As if summoned by the thought, Lane called. “Hi. How goes it?”
“Oh, fine. I’m hungry and so I’m going to work out. And I miss you.”
“I’m missing you too. All the time lately.”
From there the conversation spiraled down through a long string of exchanged and rehashed excuses for not seeing each other and Anna’s attempt to explain Sam, pretty much without success.
“Look,” Anna finally said, “I’d like to tell you more about this investigator guy, but really I shouldn’t. The way he works, if I talk I’m breaking my word. Oh, hell. I can tell you. It’s a guy who sometimes calls himself Sam. I know when a person is well connected and Sam is that.”
“Well hung or well connected?”
“Don’t be crude and especially don’t be jealous. I don’t know his full name because he doesn’t give it out to clients, but he seems very solid. I’m having him checked out.”
“Sounds serious.”
“It is.”
“Listen, you take care of Jason. When you’re done you call me. We’ll meet. Maybe we can start over.”
But she could hear a difference in his voice. There was resignation and sadness, and she knew he didn’t really believe what he was saying. What they really needed was a dinner or two to break up properly. It would require a weird dance of words, each party trying desperately not to feel rejected and trying not to make the other feel rejected. A perfect parity parting. That was what Lane was thinking and she knew it. Probably because that was what she was thinking.
Still, she wouldn’t close the door. Maybe they could work something out. Then a new thought zinged through her mind. Maybe he had been seeing someone else. These things could be very subtle at first. He had three women in his current movie. Two were single, and it really didn’t matter that the third was married. People got ideas, married or single, and LA people were among the worst.
Lane would not cheat, but he might think, and if he was thinking ...
She tried to shake her bad thoughts. She had absolutely no reason to doubt Lane. More reason to doubt herself. It was so easy to start thinking. It was like food. An iron will was required. Maybe she was thinking about Sam. She hadn’t liked the sound of her own voice when she told Lane not to be jealous of Sam.
On the desk was a script. She loved it. If she took it, there was no doubt it would take her further from Lane. Somebody once told her that everybody who makes it to the top is hard in the core. They make sacrifices in their personal life—killer instinct, some called it God, she hoped it wasn’t true.
She called her agent “Let’s make the deal on
August Moon.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Okay, honey. You got it.”
Gathering her things, she called to Genevieve, her young assistant, and said she was leaving. Anna normally employed people in their twenties as assistants, people interested in the arts, acting, design, and the like. These tended to be somewhat informal arrangements and she often had four or five in her employ at once, although she usually tried to find things for them to do that would keep them out from under her nose. Sometimes that was difficult. Genevieve would probably never be an actress, but she was the best assistant Anna had ever found.
Anna was having dinner with her ex at his place. She wondered if she should have mentioned it to Lane.
On her way out the door she called Lane again.
“This will only take a minute.”
“No. Problem. Shoot.”
“Do you have any secrets from me?”
He sighed. “I’m not having sex with anyone else, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’s okay; I’ve got my secrets too. I’m going to take the part in
August Moon.”
“I see,” he said.
“You can assume things or you can keep an open mind.”
“Come on, Anna. It takes a lot more time. It’s a big commitment.”
“That part is true. But we can work around it.”
“We didn’t use to have secrets.”
“I know that.”
“So let’s get together.”
“We will. As soon as I can. Good-bye. I love you,” she said after a second. She winced, not because it was a lie, but because the “I love you” had become a thoughtless habit.
While she took a taxi over to Park Avenue she pondered how the evening might go with Josh. It would be important to be warm, but not so warm as to be confusing.
She had married Joshua a few months after Jimmy died. There was a whirlwind engagement, so short it was hardly worthy of the name, a marriage, and fourteen months later a divorce. Just like “his” and “hers” in the linen closet, there was “his” and “hers” when it came to impressions about the breakup.
As is often the case, there was a precipitating event triggering the breakup that had little to do with the substance of their growing disengagement. Joshua had become intoxicated and had gotten sexual with one of her friends. Before that, she was contemplating some attempt to stop the unraveling of her marriage. It had begun occurring to her that maybe there was something inside her that made long-term relationships difficult.
Joshua’s indiscretion killed the last of her waning desire to work on the marriage. Initially unaware that he had been caught in his infidelity, Joshua was dismissed from her heart before he figured out she had left, and he still suffered from having been beaten to the punch.
According to Joshua, their breakup was brought about by Anna always wanting control but never wanting intimacy. She wanted appearances and she wanted to be adored and she wanted passion; at home there was to be a festive environment, everybody happy all the time; no problems. She wanted to help the needy unless the needy included her husband. And finally, as a sort of crowning contradiction, she wanted constant emotional stimulation. When every single day could not be filled with breathless passion, she got bored and began withdrawing. And that, according to Josh, gave her the excuse she needed to dump him after a minor indiscretion.
She arrived late at Josh’s, but he was his usual forgiving self.
“You made good time.”
“That’s nice of you to say.” She kissed his cheek and came in.
They walked from the front door through the entry and living room in silence, Josh no doubt contemplating his game plan while she considered her own. She wore a simple Calvin Klein pantsuit, and from the corner of her eye she caught Josh looking her up and down.
“You have on your friendly-but-formal face.”
She smiled.
“Am I reading you right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“The face does not come naturally to you.”
Joshua was tall and slender and charming. He had a large, friendly mouth with perfect teeth, not unlike Anna’s. He was nothing like Sam in the physique department, but he was nice-looking, even naked.
More pleasantries followed. He offered her wine, one of her current favorites, a 1996 Turley Zinfandel. Josh loved wine, was very thoughtful about it, and always knew what she was drinking. For dessert he would offer her a Sauterne Chateau d’Yquem 1990 and she would choose a beer.
He lived in a four-thousand-square-foot apartment and was one of the most successful pension fund managers in New York—the youngest and one of the richest partners in his Wall Street firm. He had picked all the right tech stocks, exited before the 2001 collapse, then gotten back in very judiciously. Josh was the quintessential “catch.”
They sat on the small sofa by the gas fireplace and near the window where they used to sit, she at her end, he at his. Immediately she curled her feet beneath her, which made her more difficult to approach. Over the wall-to-wall beige carpet lay a beautiful Persian, a wedding gift. The couch they had picked out together after they moved in.
They talked about her current movie, a tale about the desperate girl who is really a jewel, who starts out poor, ends up rich, becomes detached and even cold.
“And of course, as she draws from the hairy-chested man his buried humanity, they fall in love.” Anna concluded her summation.
“If you’re trying to make this your life story, can I be him?”
“Do you think I’m detached?”
At that Josh grinned.
High-Grade was one of the best auto parts stores in LA. It sold every imaginable accessory and part and also did custom fabrication. The building occupied a full fifty thousand square feet on a single floor. In front of the building a huge parking lot circumscribed nearly half of the structure and ended at a ten-foot-high stone wall. On the wall were signs, every five feet, warning of cut glass atop. Behind the wall and out of sight was a second Cyclone fence with razor wire. At night security patrolled the outer fences. The property was flanked by a large wholesale plumbing outlet and a retail lumberyard.
To the right side of the building was a break in the wall, a large iron gate, and a small guard shack. Trucks with parts came and went through the gate, as did Sam and his staff. Sam owned the building and kept his offices in the back—difficult to find if you weren’t one of the chosen few.
In order to gain access a person had to go through the gate in the stone wall, past the guard shack, and through a door on the side of the building constantly monitored by cameras. To get through the outer door one needed a plastic fob to unlock the computer-activated dead bolt After going through the first door, a room with comfortable chairs, magazines, artwork, and more cameras waited. If Sam’s staff liked what they saw of you on the closed-circuit TV, they opened a thick steel door embedded in a concrete wall. If there was some question, you never got in and they called the guard shack for an escort off the property.
The entire building was concrete block, but the portion housing Sam’s offices had an additional reinforced concrete wall inside the outer block wall, and lining the office interior under the Sheetrock was a layer of Kevlar. There were windows in Sam’s office, but the panes were manufactured from the type of glass used on the president’s limousine. The openings looked a little like tunnels because it was a full eighteen inches from the Sheetrock interior to the exterior of the concrete block.
The furnishings and finish of the place felt like a government office—practical, functional, not particularly expensive, and definitely not elegant except for the conference area, which was wood-paneled with built-in bookshelves that housed various collector’s items: a ship’s telescope from the early nineteenth century; a bread-loaf-sized Inuit polar bear statue carved two hundred years ago from the tusk of a woolly mammoth; a bronze sextant used by Sam’s mentor, Professor Alfred Channing, when he was a young officer in the merchant marine; a ceremonial Tilok headdress worn by his grandfather Stalking Bear; and an original Leonardo da Vinci drawing of a partially dissected cadaver that, Sam was always careful to explain, had been made before the pope forbade the artist to dissect bodies.
This was where Sam greeted visitors. There had been a number of visitors in the year before he’d quit to go sailing—government officials from noteworthy gumshoe organizations of several nations.
All such visits were made to enlist Sam’s help in obtaining information. These were by no means all of the meetings with these men or these agencies. Many occurred at a beach house owned by Sam, with Paul presiding in his place.
Only the officials Sam knew personally, and trusted, were invited to his office to meet him face-to-face, and when invited they brought no uninvited guests. Everything in life, even true love, comes with a price, and Sam had taken on certain obligations when he accepted certain data downloads from the government.
The government was no more eager to talk about their work with Sam than was Sam himself. Sam helped the government, and usually he helped a great deal, but he never charged a fee that they didn’t claim was unconscionable unless it struck him that he should accept favors and information in trade.
Since the advent of U.S. domestic terrorism, the government had been extremely forgiving of Sam’s legal excesses, especially when they were producing valuable leads on terrorist activity. The government never seemed to notice that some of their questions could only be answered by means of rather obvious invasions of privacy, such as the time he hacked into a national rental car agency computer and the suspect’s personal computer to successfully thwart a bomber who had filled an entire car trunk with C-4 plastic explosive. By the time the FBI had enough evidence for a search warrant, Sam had violated the suspect’s legal rights several times over. Hence Sam had to provide the government not only the necessary evidence, but also a legitimate way to discover it.
Anonymous tips may be used in the presence of corroborative evidence to support a search warrant, and Sam was responsible for many such tips—including leaving a suspect chained to a police station guardrail with a sign around his neck. The sign said: I DEFRAUD MY CLIENTS. At the man’s feet were financial records in a box that proved the fraud. The state court judge ruled that the sign constituted a legitimate tip and created probable cause to search the box.
The centerpiece of the offices and the heart of all that Sam did was Big Brain. Big Brain’s claims to fame were the immensity of its database, the speed with which it could be fed, and its ability to simultaneously operate for its own purposes hundreds of computers over the Internet. The secrets of its success, however, were found in the search tools and computer code that sorted and sifted the data and ultimately decided which of the billions of bits of information were relevant to a particular inquiry.
Even when Sam was off sailing, the data never stopped rolling into Big Brain, and the dozen or so technicians who worked for Grogg never left their stations. At the moment they were crunching and gobbling information about Grace Technologies and thousands of people associated with it and comparing that with information already in the database. Grogg worked to set out parameters in the software that would outline search modes of interest. This activity would increase tenfold with the arrival of his investigators.
Sam worked in a big room filled with cubicles and acoustical dividers occupied by all his in-house investigators. They seldom left the office. The actual gumshoe work was contracted out to licensed and unlicensed private detectives around the nation and the globe.
Sam sat behind his desk, a position he hadn’t taken for months, hunched in front of a computer screen and talking off and on to Paul. Paul sat in a special soundproof room, from which he had been listening to Anna Wade’s ex-husband, Joshua Nash, speak. Evidently he and Anna were having wine and talking.
Paul was listening to live feed from a huge parabolic mike aimed at Josh’s window, along with the transmissions from Anna’s cell phone, when she chose to use it, and congratulating himself on the results. Sam and Paul felt guilty about the bug in the apartment’s sprinkler system and were trying not to use it. But the parabolic mike was iffy, and faded in critical parts of telephone conversations that were being used as tests, so they had to resort to the internal mike, thereby breaking the law in a more meaningful fashion.
The audio feed also fed Big Brain. Among other things, the computer was making voiceprints for future comparison and pairing the voiceprints with facial-recognition software, handwriting-recognition software, and signature-recognition software, routine procedure for every person identified in Big Brain’s memory banks.
“They’re getting onto the subject of Lane,” Paul alerted Sam.
“She’s working around to her brother. I can feel it.”
Sam minimized his screen on DuShane Chellis and joined Paul in the booth. He heard a male voice, the voice of Joshua Nash.
“How are things with Lane?” Josh asked.
“You wouldn’t ask if you thought they were good.” Anna’s response was fainter but clear.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you and Lane ever—”
“Josh, it was a symptom. Can’t we leave it at that?”
“Isn’t there some way you can find to forgive me?”
“For the adultery or for lying to my face about it?”
There was a barely audible sigh. “We didn’t actually—”
“Please, let’s be real. It’s been years. And we aren’t going to discuss the gynecologic details of something more than three years old. For God’s sake, I’ve had Lane for almost two years and you’ve had I don’t know how many girlfriends.”
A long silence followed. Sam and Paul watched the speaker.
“We gotta turn this off if they start ... you know,” Paul said.
“I know,” Sam said. “I know.”
Anna wanted to abandon the topic, but Josh kept on.
“Word’s out that Lane is cranky. He wants a companion-wife kind of woman. You’re a megastar.”
Josh followed his remarks with a knowing but sad smile. She knew he desperately wanted sex. Before Lane, but after she and Josh had separated, three years ago almost to the day, she had given him that much, knowing that she shouldn’t, knowing it would feed his unbelievable optimism. It had been a moment of insanity that she wouldn’t repeat.
Instead she thought about Sam stirring his tofu spaghetti. She thought about the sound of his swimming behind her and recalled her utter certainty that he would follow. Then there was the shouting and name-calling, the competition, and suddenly she wondered why they had been fighting. Something stirred inside her, and whatever it was made her want to fight with Sam some more.
“Josh, I’m sorry, you really are a dear person to me, but I’d rather not talk about that.” She watched him, feeling his uncertainty. “Please.”
“Okay.” He forced the disappointment from his face. “Well, we’ve got a great dinner ahead of us. And I want a few dances.”
“As many as you like, Josh. As many as you like.” He carried her wine to the table and acted as though it were a dinner date with a New York cousin. He had his dignity and he wouldn’t bring it up again—this time.
She waited until the main course to bring up her brother and Sam. Being patient was killing her. Josh Nash had an armor-piercing mind. Nobody was beyond his reach when it came to information. He lived on information. If anyone could see through Sam’s veil, it would be Josh. Just as important, he knew Grace and he knew Chellis. Deep down she still didn’t know what they were capable of, and perhaps Josh did.
It took her twenty minutes to tell the story. Josh listened intently and waited until she finished before firing questions at her.
He asked about Sam’s speech, his yacht, the books on board, and whether she had seen any personal records. The questions were exhaustive and he took notes. She told him what she knew: Sam had a Ph.D., likely in computer science. His father, now deceased, had been in the military special forces, his mother was Native American and had been to college. With the last disclosure she began feeling lizardlike.
“How are you supposed to get hold of him?”
“I have an e-mail address.”
“What is it?”
“Firechief at bluehades dot com.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“That’s it.”
“Okay, I’ll trace that to a server some place.”
“I want to know about him but I don’t want to get caught looking. Above all else, you can’t get caught.”
“Are you sweet on this guy?”
“I don’t know what we would have in common. I know very little about him.”
“What’s your gut tell you? What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about him?”
“Fighting. Wanting to smack him upside the head.”
Josh laughed. “This Sam must have done something nasty.”
“He saved my life.”
She watched the corners of Josh’s mouth turn down.
“Come on, Josh, don’t worry. I’ll tell you when you need to look smitten. We aren’t there yet. And you’re too big a man to ever allow even a whisper of a whine to pass your lips. Besides, if you’re going to be jealous, be jealous of the right guy. Be jealous of Lane.”
“You know you are really good. You’d have me holding my head at my own execution and my decapitated face still smiling. I’ll try to find out about Sam. Boats are registered. This guy told you things but was very selective. No schools, no Indian tribe. People can’t hide. Nobody can. But this guy is sure trying.”
“I know. God, I feel like some lower life form doing this.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I promised not to talk and now I’m talking.”
“You didn’t mention that when you went through the list.”
“I know. I feel really guilty.”
“Listen, it’s sensible to know something about this guy before you trust your life to him. Why was he in the vicinity?”
“I know. I know.”
He looked at his notes. “The mother thing, if we knew the tribe or the school, could be the break we need.”
“But we don’t. And if you ask Peter Malkey, the only mutual friend that I seem to share with Sam, he’ll tell him and I’m cooked, so don’t make that mistake.”
“No hint of a real name?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. Unless you want to call Sam of the
Silverwind
a
hint.”
“Just be careful.” He paused. “What else? There’s something else, isn’t there?”
“Jason gave me a CD-ROM at the lodge. I was going to catch a seaplane that I had called in after he gave it to me. He was so serious about it I wanted to get out of there. It’s the reason I was running. Jason is so mixed up by his paranoia sometimes, I can’t be sure why he gave it to me. I’m sure it’s full of his research. That means it’s valuable to Grace. I want to take it to a mathematician that I can totally trust. I want to deliver it myself.”