“No,
sick.”
“Oh.”
“Yes.” She sounded very far away, and small, and it made me miss her all the more. “I feel awful.”
“I think I've found her,” I said. “If everything goes well, I could be in Ireland in another seven days or so. Maybe less.”
“When you reach her, speak in Georgian,” Alena said. “That will help her.”
“I'll remember that. Can you put Bridgett on?”
“Here she is.”
“Bridgett?”
“She gets angry when she throws up,” Bridgett said. “It's funny.”
“Nice to know you two are still getting along.”
“Things are better.”
“That's good to hear.”
“Yeah, she's been so tired the last couple of days she barely has the energy to insult me.”
“Ah.”
“I hear her right? You're close?”
“Think so.”
“Good,” said Bridgett. “I want to go home.”
“You're not the only one,” I told her.
Sharala, Auggie, and Solomon met me for breakfast the next morning at a greasy spoon close to the campus.
“We've got a design we like,” Sharala told me. “Limor, when she did the Wave Bubble, it was a little thing, could fit in a cigarette pack. The power you're talking about, we need to scale that up. So we're thinking of a toolbox, one of those big metal ones, which'll give us some design benefits, as long as everything's insulated. It's gonna be heavy, though.”
“How heavy?”
“Well, we're using a car battery for power, so, you know, that plus some.”
“Doesn't sound like anything I can't handle.”
“We emailed the Gerbers this morning, like, at three A.M.,” Solomon said. “We're having the PCBs sent FedEx, like, warp speed, they should be here tomorrow.”
“In English,” I said.
“Gerbers,” Sharala explained. “Think circuit diagrams, okay? PCB is printed circuit board.”
“Gotcha.”
Auggie slid a piece of notepaper over to me, a sketch of the design. The drawing was of a standard-sized toolbox, cutaway, notations all over it.
“With the car battery, this thing should go two, three hours before burning out,” Auggie interjected. “And it's going to burn out, this much power, it's going to get hot, start melting components.”
“That's more than enough time,” I said.
“Cool. The other thing with the design, here, is that you'll need to attach the antennae yourself—we're using two of them, you can see here. You just pop the toolbox open, screw 'em on, then hit the Big Red Button and away you go.”
“Big Red Button?” I asked.
The seriousness with which they regarded me made it seem as if we'd been discussing a nuclear bomb, and not a cellular jammer.
“There must always,” Solomon told me, “be a Big Red Button.”
After our meeting, I made my way to an Office Depot and dumped a couple hundred dollars on a printer, plain and photo paper, extra ink cartridges, and a spindle-stack of CD-ROMs. Next stop was a Walgreens, where I bought myself two packs of white cotton gloves, the kind used for dermatological care.
I'd checked out of the hotel before leaving for breakfast,
and so headed to the apartment, where I set up a workspace on the floor. I got the printer unpacked and communicating with my laptop, and then, wearing a set of the gloves, loaded the tray with photo paper. Then, one after the other, I began printing off multiple copies of all the photographs that Vladek Karataev had taken with his BlackBerry. While the printer ran, I opened up the word processor and began writing.
It was a long process. While the writing went quickly, the printing did not, and each time a sheet was finished, I had to don my gloves to remove it from the tray. It slowed an already time-consuming process immeasurably. I'd gone through most of the ink cartridges, and the world had shifted back into night, before I was finished.
Then, again using the gloves, I loaded the plain paper, and printed out sixteen separate copies of what I had written. I put each aside, with a set of the photographs.
Last, I began burning the CDs. On each one, I included digital copies of the photographs, and most of the video that Vladek had taken. As with the photographs, I left out all images of Tiasa Lagidze.
“Wow, you look wasted,” Sharala said to me the next morning. “Have some coffee.”
“Don't do coffee.”
“You get any sleep?”
“I was up all night,” I admitted. “Where are we?”
“You want the good news or the bad news?” Solomon asked.
“Bad news first.”
“We're having difficulty tracking down the power amplifier,” Auggie said. “All the normal supply houses we go to for
parts like this, they're out of stock. Sharala and I must've gone to every RadioShack in the greater Vegas area looking for one, no luck there, either. We think we found a guy in Canada, but the earliest it'll get here will be tomorrow.”
“Okay,” I said. “And the good news?”
“The good news is that the yellow boards arrived just before we came out to meet you,” Solomon said. “All four of them.”
“Yellow boards are…?”
“The PCBs, we told you this.”
“You called them PCBs last time.”
“They're the same thing.”
“I see.”
“We'll start assembling and testing today,” Sharala said. “We get the amplifier tomorrow, we could have the box ready maybe tomorrow night, the day after at the latest.”
I did a quick mental calculation, which wasn't all that quick given my lack of sleep. “That'll work.”
“Then we'll see you tomorrow.”
On the way back to the apartment, I stopped at the same Walgreens I had the day before, and then at a high-end photography store. At the Walgreens I bought first aid supplies, a couple of cheap towels, and a cheap cowboy hat; at the photo place I paid far too much for a Nikon digital camera, two lenses, an adaptor, and a sixteen-gig memory card.
Back at the apartment, I took a shower, shaved, and changed the dressings on my wounds. Where I'd torn stitches in my side, the flesh looked angry and red, but when I gave the laceration a gentle squeeze, nothing issued from the wound in exchange for the pain I inflicted on myself. If I was carrying an infection, I couldn't tell.
I finished tending my wounds, then I lay down on the floor of my unfurnished apartment and tried to get some sleep. I didn't think I'd be able to do it, but surprised myself when I awoke seven hours later, sore and stiff, but feeling marginally refreshed. I dressed and headed out, taking the car back to the rental service. I dropped it off there, caught a cab, and hit the first used-car lot I could find.
After forty-five minutes and some haggling, I purchased, in cash, a ten-year-old VW Jetta with seventy-eight thousand miles on it. It wasn't the nicest car I'd ever owned, but close examination of the engine and tires had given me faith that I could rely upon it to do what I required.
I drove my new used car back to the apartment, picked up my messenger bag and filled it with the Glock, the camera, and the lenses. Then I hit the interstate, heading east.
The drive to New Paradise took two hours, and it was still light enough when I arrived in the town that I only needed one of the two lenses. I parked on the main street, put on my cowboy hat, and, keeping an eye out for cops, took a handful of photographs. I made certain to get at least one of the big wooden “Welcome to New Paradise” sign. Then I got back in the Jetta and drove to a local movie theater, where I paid to see something loud, with superheroes in it. I didn't pay much attention.
By the time the film had finished, it had gone dark. I found the Albertson's I'd been directed to before, then followed the route Mike had driven for another mile, before pulling over at the strip mall with the Starbucks and parking. I took the messenger bag and went on foot from there, staying off the streets and out of the lights where I could. After twenty-three
minutes I reached the stone wall bordering the Oasis housing development.
Following the wall, I worked my way around it to the north. Streetlamps burned along the empty streets full of empty houses, and the best I could manage from my side was a spot that wasn't in direct light. The fence was close to three meters high, but the stone made finding handholds and footholds relatively easy, and I scrambled up and over, dropping down and into cover as quickly as possible, ignoring the stabbing pain that shot from my side. I checked the BlackBerry, saw it was eleven minutes to midnight.
It was almost twelve-thirty before I found the cul-de-sac. Sneaking through the deserted streets had made me feel like I was traveling through a ghost town, and my paranoia certainly didn't help that. Every noise made me stop, ducking for cover. Twice I heard cars, and once I saw headlights, went prone beneath a line of untended and dying bushes. A New Paradise police car rolled past but didn't stop.
There was an abandoned—or never occupied—house opposite the mouth of the cul-de-sac, and I went around the back, began trying the doors and windows. Nothing on the ground floor was open, and while I could get up to the second floor, working my way around the building searching for an open entry was going to be risky. The houses, however, looked like they all had finished basements, and when I noticed that, I went around again, searching for an egress. Building code would've required a way out in an emergency, if the house, say, was on fire. I found one on the west side, a dugout with a short metal ladder, dropped myself the five feet down into it, then ran my hands along the edges of the window, trying to get a feel for how it opened, if it slid up or would swing out. Closer examination revealed, barely, the hinges on the inside of the window, on
the right-hand side. I put my back to the wall of the dugout, and my boot to the side opposite the hinges, and started pushing. Hard.
It broke open with a
pop
, and I slid through on my belly into darkness, landing on a cold concrete floor. I righted myself, closed the window as best I could, then waited for my night vision to catch up with the rest of me. It wasn't doing very well, because there was almost no ambient light penetrating the house. I started forward carefully, feeling my way, and then stopped when I realized I was being a fucking idiot.
From the messenger bag, I removed the camera and one of my two lenses, hooked them together. Then I switched the camera on, heard it whine with power, and put it to my eye, seeing the world through night-vision green. With the camera to help me, I made my way through the finished basement, to a flight of stairs, and onto the ground floor, and then, from there, to the second story, moving with care the whole time, staying away from the windows.
There was a room on the second floor that was perfect for what I wanted, facing directly onto the cul-de-sac. I hunkered down, switching my lenses, then using the adaptor to thread the night-vision lens onto the telephoto. It made the whole thing ungainly and heavy, but when I looked down the viewfinder, everything was crystal clear, and zoom brought out the detail.
The same three cars were parked outside tonight, the Lexus, the Porsche, and the 4×4. I took multiple pictures of each of them, zooming in to catch their license plates. Then I took a good dozen more shots of the house itself, some in context, some zooming in close to pick out details, so that the pictures would aid in its identification. I checked my clock, saw it was now twenty-six minutes past one.
For the next hour, I sat with my camera, watching the house. Light leaked out from around drawn curtains, and sometimes I saw shadows, movement within, but nothing that would make a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. At two-fifteen, a New Paradise police car rolled lazily down the street, stopping directly in front of my house. After a handful of seconds, it started forward again, and I realized that the driver had been checking the cul-de-sac, had most likely never even looked in my direction.
At three minutes to three, the garage door opened, and the black Town Car began backing down the driveway. I brought the camera up and took another half dozen pictures, again catching the license plate. The car windows were tinted enough that I couldn't see the passenger, but just as the Town Car came onto the street, I saw Bella Downs race out of the house, carrying what looked like a small piece of hand luggage. I took pictures of her, too, as well as Mike, who was once again behind the wheel of the car, visible for a moment as he rolled down his window to take the offered bag. He was handing it to someone in the backseat as the window came up again, and I couldn't see who his passenger was, or even how many people might've been inside.
The Town Car pulled away, and, for a moment, Bella Downs stood in the driveway, surveying her domain. Then she put a hand to her hair, patting it back into place, and I got another three pictures of her before she turned to head back inside the house. I lowered the camera.
Then movement in one of the McMansion's windows caught my attention, and I brought the lens up once more, trying to zoom in on it. Someone had pulled back the curtains in a room on the second floor, and I adjusted the focus. Light inside the room threw off the night vision, created a bloom that
obscured what I was seeing in a cloud of orange. I hastily removed the adaptor, tried to get a view inside again.
It was a girl, standing there, holding the curtain back. She was blonde, her hair past her shoulders, wearing a red camisole. She was crying.
I had to remind myself to take a picture, then a couple more.
The girl turned, alarmed at something inside the room, a sound, and Bradley entered the shot. With one hand, he took hold of the girl by the shoulder. With his other, he punched her in the stomach, and the difference in their sizes, their strengths, made me think of a child beating on a rag doll. The girl would've gone down, doubled over, but Bradley didn't let her, ready to hit her again.