72 Hours (A Thriller) (22 page)

Lindsay was silent.
 
She lowered her head.
 
Slowly pressed her hands to her face.

“How could they fire you for that?
 
Why would they even consider it?”

“Rivero’s mother sued.
 
Her son was unarmed and in the privacy of his own home.
 
There was no search warrant.
 
No arrest warrant.
 
I didn’t knock.
 
Didn’t announce myself.
 
I simply busted down the door, saw what I saw, and blasted her son straight into the next life.”

Lindsay slid her hands down her face and turned her eyes toward the stars above.

“What about your life before the FBI?
 
Was that what you always wanted to do, or were there other stops along the way?”

“Straight out of school I went into the Army.
 
Special Forces.
 
That led to a few other opportunities.”

“Such as?”

“That’s a story for another day.”

She nodded.
 
“Understood.”

“Tell me about Dunbar,” Archer said.
 

“He made his first fortune selling real estate to Silicon Valley billionaires.
 
Then he turned his attention to the stock market and fell in love with the oil industry.
 
He was worth three hundred million before he turned forty.”

“Tell me about the murders”

“They disappeared on Sydney and Gaston’s fifth anniversary.
 
Sydney and Robin spent the day shopping on Rodeo Drive.
 
A family friend recalled seeing her loading bags into the backseat of her Aston Martin convertible, dressed in Prada and spiky black Manolo Blahniks.
 
She called me around noon, said that the rest of the afternoon would be busy with errands.
 
She sounded happy but tired.
 
That was the last time I spoke to my sister.
 
They had a late dinner at Sydney’s favorite Beverly Hills bistro.
 
Gaston later told detectives he left separately because he needed to deliver contracts to a client on his way home.
 
Sydney and Robin left in the Aston Martin.
 
The car was never seen again, as if it had simply evaporated into thin air.”

“Did you suspect Dunbar?”

“Not in the beginning.
 
He seemed genuinely distraught.
 
He poured a ton of money into the search effort.”

“He probably would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for the death of a man named Kenneth Brant.”

“What was the connection?”

“Brant was a playboy living on a yacht in Marina del Rey who turned up missing the same week Sydney and Robin disappeared.
 
Divers found his body chained to a concrete block at the bottom of the harbor.
 
A bloody thumbprint was lifted from one end of a marble countertop in the yacht’s galley.
 
The blood belonged to Brant, but the print did not.”

“Let me guess.
 
It was Dunbar’s print”

“Bingo.
 
Brant and Sydney had been having an affair and Dunbar found them out.”

Archer’s gaze drifted to her profile, then back toward the dusky landscape.
 
“Why do you think he’s doing this?”

“Because he can.
 
To show that he still has power over me, even locked away behind those thick prison walls.
 
He wants me to fear him.”

The shrill cry of a coyote lifted up from the desert flats, fading with the breeze.
 

Archer was thoughtful for a few beats, then asked, “But why would he wait until now?”

She shrugged.
 
“This is simply one last narcissistic display of hatred before they turn out his lights.”

Archer wasn’t convinced.
 

She hugged her arms across her chest again.
 
“So what’s the story on this place?
 
This bunker thing underneath us?
 
Why is it here?”
 

“It’s a remnant of the Cold War, back in the days when everyone spent all day long fretting about somebody nuking us.”

“Must have cost a fortune.”

He nodded.

“Unbelievable,” she sighed.
   

“I’m sure they have a similar plan in place in the event of another major terrorist attack.”

“How did Raj and Simeon end up here?”

“I don’t know.”
 

“They seem like interesting men.”

A breeze stirred.
 
Lindsay shivered.
 
She rubbed her arms again.
     

“It’s cooler at this elevation because of the wind.
 
Let’s get you back inside,” he said.

CHAPTER 66

Archer climbed aboard the Polaris four-wheeled ATV as Simeon summarized the basics of operation.
 
Archer pushed a pair of goggles up to his forehead.

Lindsay had followed them out through the door.
 
“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Going out to the gate.”

“I’m going with you.”

“Sorry,” Archer said.
 
“I brought you here to keep you safe.
 
Goes against the whole idea if I haul you out there into the unknown.
 
Go sit with your kids.
 
I’ll be back in a while.”
 
Archer turned the key and pressed the ignition switch.
 
The Polaris rumbled.

Lindsay glared at him disapprovingly.

Archer popped the goggles down over his eyes, punched through the gears with the toe of his shoe until he found reverse, and then backed out of the parking slot.
 
He punched it into first gear and wheeled the ATV in a tight arc, the headlights swinging across the big wall of the cavernous hub.

The front end bumped onto the ramp.
 
Archer eased back on the throttle and felt the twin-cylinders surge forward.
 
He passed a laser eye mounted in the wall which activated the automatic door-opening mechanism.
 
The metal panels lifted open on their pneumatic arms.
 
The ATV bumped out onto the desert floor and he turned it down the set of narrow ruts that led away from the underground compound.

The panel doors eased gently shut behind him, the pneumatic arms retracting inward with a hiss of air.
 

CHAPTER 67

Soji had Green Day playing on his iPod.
 
Turned up real loud.
 
Rocking out to the jangling guitars on
American Idiot
.
 
He had the earbuds in and his seat racked way back so that if he opened his eyes he’d be staring at the ceiling of the car.
 
But his eyes were closed.
 
He was half asleep.
 
He was rocking out so he wouldn’t drift off.
 
It had been dark for hours and getting colder.
 

Smackdown had called with an offer.
 
A hundred grand to just sit tight and wait for the Hummer to move.
 
That’s all he had to do.
 
Soji could do that for a week for a hundred grand, plus he could still sell the photos he’d already emailed to the office.
 

The battery on his laptop was running low.
 
He had an adapter for the cigarette lighter, but that was only going to do him good as long he had juice in the car battery, and he had to watch his fuel.
 
He couldn’t sit out there in the desert for twelve hours with the motor running.
 
He had to conserve his resources because he didn’t want to get stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Every half an hour he would fire up the laptop for a few minutes and get an update off the GPS linkup.
 
The Hummer hadn’t budged.
 
Soji tweaked the attachment in the USB port and refreshed the GPS application.
 
Still nothing.
 
He had decided to sit tight and wait it out, see if anything happened.
 
Watch for signs of the Hummer and hope that the problem was just a glitch in the software or a glitch in the satellite linkup.
 
Surely somebody somewhere would notice the error and make the proper adjustment.
 
He powered down the computer and racked his seat back.
 
He shut his eyes and turned up the volume in the earbuds.
 
He was almost asleep when the window next to him exploded.

Soji flinched and turned his head.
 
Glass blew inward, raining down on him.
 
He crossed his forearms over his face.
 
The motion of his arms jerked the headphones from his ears.
 
The music snapped off.
 

Someone jerked the door open and pulled him up and out by the front of his shirt.
 
Soji shrieked.
 
Small glass fragments that had covered his front side fell away, tinkling to the ground.
 
Hands pressed him hard against the side of the car.
 
His eyes were squeezed shut.
 
A hand had him by the throat.

“Look at me!” a stern voice ordered.

Soji nearly crapped his pants.
 

“Look at me!”

Soji squinted, blinking rapidly.
 
He was stunned by what he saw.
 
It was the man from the Hummer.
 
The same man from the woods in Malibu the previous night.

Archer had the same stunned reaction.

“I’ve seen you,” Archer said.

“No, man!” Soji insisted.
 
“I don’t know you, man!”

Archer pressed the Beretta to the side of Soji’s head.

“Yeah.
 
Last night,” Archer said, nodding.
 
“In Malibu.
 
I knew I should have killed you.”

“Oh God, please dude!
 
It’s not what you think!”

Archer applied pressure to his throat.

Soji struggled to breathe.
 

Archer drilled the muzzle of the Beretta into Soji’s skull, half an inch above his left eye.
 
“What are you doing here?”
 

“Pictures, dude!
 
Just pictures!
 
That’s my job, dude!
 
Nothing else!”

Archer knew from what Lindsay and the kids had said that he was probably mostly telling the truth.
 
He shoved the Beretta down the back of his pants and then patted him down with the free hand.
 
The little man was clean.
 
Just baggy shorts and the Lakers jersey.

“Stay right here,” Archer said.
 
“Don’t even blink or I’ll blow your head off your shoulders.
 
Got that?”

Soji nodded, eyes wide.

Archer released the grip on his throat and took a step back.
 
He assessed the little Asian man.

“Who are you?”

“Name’s Soji.”

“OK, Soji.
 
So you’ve been taking pictures.”

Soji nodded.

“You were in Brentwood yesterday afternoon, and then in Malibu last night.
 
You planted the tracking device when we stopped for gas.”

Soji wrinkled his face in a kind of acknowledgement of guilt.
 

Archer glanced inside the open door of the car and saw the laptop open on the passenger seat.
 
He grabbed it and set it on the roof of the car.

“Turn it on,” he ordered.

Soji nodded.
 
The operating system went swiftly through its boot-up process, then a screen covered in desktop icons appeared.
 
Soji stepped aside.

Archer squinted at the screen and saw the icon for the GPS application.
 
He double-clicked it.
 
The application blinked open.

“You’re a sneaky little bugger, aren’t you?” Archer said.

Soji shrugged.
 
“Just doing my job, dude.”

“I should drop you dead right here.”

Soji swallowed hard.

Archer made a big show of racking a bullet into the chamber of the Beretta and snicked the safety off.
 

“What are you still doing out here?”

“Waiting,” Soji said.

“Waiting for what?”

“Lindsay.”

“Why?”

“Dude, I told you.
 
I’m a paparazzi.
 
This is how I make my living.”

Archer stepped toward him and pressed the Beretta against the bridge of his nose.