Ark Storm (37 page)

Gwen listened, nodded. She was clinging to calm now, summoning it from the deep, channeling it over the roaring of blood in her brain.

“Why now? Why are you telling me now?”

She saw Dan give an infinitesimal flinch. Her voice was ice.

“Because we had a showdown. I refused to give him any stories. He fired me, told me he was going to ring you.”

“Ah, I see. So you thought you’d get your pitch in first.”

Dan glanced away, then back at Gwen. “You could put it like that. Sounds cold though.”

Gwen laughed, a bitter, curdling sound. “Cold it is.” She walked to the door. She did not allow herself to turn back to him. “Good-bye Dan.”

She called out to Leo. The dog was at her side in seconds, drawn by her voice.

Gwen grabbed her keys from the sideboard, walked out. One foot before the other.
Keep walking
said her mind. Keep it together.

Her surfboard was still in his car. She opened the door, pulled it out. Dan appeared from the house, silhouetted against the light.

“Gwen. Please don’t go. For any number of reasons, please don’t go. You’re not safe out there on your own.”

“I’m not safe here with you, either. And don’t worry about me. I’m going to go to the cops. I’m gonna tell them everything. It’s over Dan. It’s all over.”

Leaving Dan’s car door open, Gwen took her board, carried it to her car, slid it in. Leo jumped into the passenger seat. Gwen started up, drove off. She saw Dan standing on his drive, looking after her.

In their high emotion, each of them had forgotten the bug in his car.

98

THE SUPER-YACHT,
ZEPHYR
, TWELVE MILES OFF SAN LUIS OBISPO, TUESDAY NIGHT, 7:00 P.M.

The yacht
Zephyr
rode the rising waves. Sheikh Ali paced his stateroom. A wind had kicked up in the last two hours and
Zephyr
was rocking softly, well able to deal with the waves, but registering their presence. Outside, the wind had built to a roar. Even through the reinforced glass, Sheikh Ali could hear it as he paced. His starched kandoora snapped against his legs.

He turned to the man before him. The man who had adopted the name
Hassan
, even if able to use it only highly selectively.

The Sheikh veiled his distaste. Hassan was a tool. You didn’t have to like your tools, just know that they did their job efficiently and effectively. Hassan did both. He would be off the yacht soon enough, up in the helicopter, homeward bound.

“Update me. Please,” he added, a sop to Hassan’s ego. These Westerners with their sensibilities, their innocent inability to grasp the realpolitik of power … they could be tiresome. Decades of living in a feudal theocracy had schooled him well in the subtleties of power. Those reared in a democracy thought they had recourse to a larger power. A larger power that was not even God. But he knew that power came with a family name or with money or with a weapon or with the name of God as worshiped by the right sect, he thought bitterly.

“The drones are all ready,” replied Hassan with a quick smile. “I ordered twenty extras too, so we’re all set up.”

“Good,” the Sheikh smiled back. “I do like the drones. They are almost poetical to me.”

Hassan ignored this comment. He never knew what to do with the Sheikh’s odd bursts of whimsy. He stuck to the details.

“I’ve got two takeoff strips ready so we can get as many drones airborne as quickly as possible.”

“Good thinking.”

“And I reckon the model’s all ready too. As good as it’s ever going to get.”

The Sheikh sat down, took a sip of his cardamom-flavored coffee.

“All we need now is the right storm,” he murmured, glancing out of the windows.

Hassan followed his glance. “A good one’s powering toward us right now.” He stuck out his arms, allowed the yacht to pitch him gently from side to side. He dropped his arms to his sides, took out his iPad, scrolled through until he came to the National Weather Service site.

“They’ve issued a warning, the NWS. Not a high alert, but a storm warning nonetheless. The ARk Storm people are quiet. Nothing from USGS or FEMA or CalEMA.”

The Sheikh held up his hand, scowling.

“Who the hell are that lot? I know USGS, but FEMA and CalEMA?”

“Federal Emergency Management Agency and California Emergency Management Agency. If they thought an ARk Storm was on its way, they’d be bleating to all hell.”

“But their silence isn’t definitive, is it? They wouldn’t want to be accused of crying wolf, warning prematurely, reducing their credibility.…”

“Exactly!” agreed Hassan enthusiastically. “Who knows,” he added with a big smile. “It could be the big one. We’ve just got to be ready.”

“And are we?”

“If we think this is it, we need the model here on board.”

“You haven’t got it with you?”

“Falcon rules. We keep it under lockdown. It’s not easy to take it out discreetly.”

The Sheikh got up, walked back to the window, looked out.

“I think maybe you should come back tomorrow with the model, don’t you?”

“Whatever you say. If you want to go live.…”

“I want to be ready,” intoned the Sheikh. “Choice is, after all, the greatest luxury of all.”

99

SEVENTEEN MILE DRIVE, 7:00 P.M.

Dan Jacobsen watched Gwen drive off. He wanted to shut down, to feel nothing. Then he saw the open car door and his face turned white.

Gwen’s declaration, her intention to go to the cops, every word she had spoken as she was removing her board from his car, would have been picked up by the bug. If someone were listening in real time, they’d be on Gwen’s trail right now. These guys had an infrastructure, they had numbers, and they had a clear intention: to protect their operation. They would have no hesitation in killing Gwen to do that. He had to find her first.

He slammed the car door, hurried back into his kitchen. He saw that she had forgotten her pocketbook. It lay under the table, abandoned. He grabbed it, grabbed his keys, ran down the stairs into his basement, spun the combination on his safe, opened it, took out a kit bag, chose his weapons. He took his favored SIG Sauer 226, grabbed three fifteen-round magazines, loaded one in the weapon and two in the covert magazine holster that he clipped on the sturdy belt that he still wore out of habit. He slid the SIG into its covert holster and pushed the holster and weapon down the inside of his jeans against his right kidney with the spare magazines pressing onto his left kidney … uncomfortable but reassuring. Next he took out the stubby Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun, slapped on the dual 30-round magazine clip and slipped the weapon into a leather shoulder holster. The H & K would be his main firepower. Secured in its holster, it fit snugly between his inner arm and the side of his chest. He hauled on a light rainproof jacket to hide the holster and weapon.

Tooled up, he felt the old surge of purpose flooding back. Every sense became hyperaware. Time seemed to slow as he moved, methodically, as if by rote. Training and experience kicked in. A lethal muscle memory. He grabbed the kitbag and Gwen’s pocketbook, locked up, alarmed his home, and sprinted for his car.

Gwen couldn’t have gone far. She had three minutes’ lead, maybe four. He should be able to catch up with her easily enough. She’d go home, he was sure of it. And probably walk straight into a trap.

He raced through the gears, driving as fast as he could without risking the cops stopping him. He’d have to lose the surveillance on him too, and that would cost him more time.

He rang her. In her bag, on the passenger seat, her cell phone trilled.

Daniel said nothing. He called on his training, on all his reserves. And then he prayed.
Don’t go home, Gwen. Please don’t go home.

100

THE SUPER-YACHT,
ZEPHYR
, 7:05 P.M.

Sheikh Ali Al Baharna reached inside his kandoora pocket, removed his cell phone, frowned, and took the call. It was The Man. His phone beeped, indicating that the encryption had not been activated. He saw the three-digit code, sent it back, waited until the code came back and the beeping stopped. He walked from the stateroom into his private quarters.

“Speak,” he said.

“Gwen Boudain has just announced she is going to go to the cops. Device on Jacobsen’s car picked it up.”

“
Yakhrab baitik,”
swore the Sheikh
. May Allah destroy your house.
His face tightened into the harshest juhayman look as fury punched through him.

“When exactly?”

“Five minutes ago. I was listening in real time.”

“You did well. Where is she now?”

“We’re trying to locate her. She drove away from Jacobsen’s place just after she made the comment. But it’ll be easy to find her. We have the tracker still active in her pocketbook.”

“Good. Find her and kill her. And kill Jacobsen too. Is the team still surveilling him?”

“Yes. Four guys, but they need hardware. One team of two will follow him, the other will peel off, meet me, get the tools. That’ll take an hour.”

“I want them both disposed of tonight. Do not under any circumstance allow Boudain to get to the police.”

“If we have to take her down in public?”

“Do it. Make it look like a robbery. Dress it up if you have time. Either way, make sure she’s dead.”

101

SEVENTEEN MILE DRIVE, 7:06 P.M.

It had started to rain, slowly at first, but now it came down heavily, sluicing over the road. The Mustang’s headlights reflected back off the slick blackness. Gwen’s wipers were wholly inadequate, batting back and forth like flickering eyelashes. Nighttime, heavy rain, visibility was crap. Gwen needed to stop, get the top up, but she drove on, heedless of the rain falling on her, falling inside her beloved car, falling on her dog, who cowered in the footwell casting baleful looks at his mistress.

She swore loudly as she took a corner at speed, felt the Mustang wallow and skid. She brought it back under control but it had given her a fright. She was lucky there’d been no car approaching. She slowed. No car crash would claim her. Daniel Jacobsen wasn’t worth dying for. She parked, caught her breath, did what she should have done first off—pulled up the roof. It’d still leak in the corners in rain this hard, but it would dry out in a day.

Dan would follow her. She knew that. She needed a bolt-hole, somewhere he wouldn’t find her. The answer came to her as she swung out of Seventeen Mile Drive. Dwayne Jonson had recently moved. Finally, he had moved out of his rented studio apartment into his own home, a fixer-upper on the wrong side of Monterey. Gwen found it easily enough. The topiaried peacock cut into the laurel hedge was a bit of a giveaway.

His Harley Low Rider was parked outside. The lights were on inside. Gwen blew out a breath of relief.

She parked, shut off the lights, got out. Leo jumped out after her, whined as the wind and rain whipped him. Gwen slammed the door, heedless of the keys she had left in the ignition. She walked up the path, Leo trailing her. The door opened. Dwayne stood framed, almost filling the whole space. He looked at Gwen, taking in the streaming wet hair, her eyes, huge in the darkness, desolation, fury and a silent plea for help flickering across them.

“Come on in.” He eyed Leo, let him pass, though he wasn’t keen on dogs at the best of times. Gwen and Leo, he knew, though, came as a package.

He didn’t touch her. She seemed to be vibrating with pain and the effort to keep it in. He knew any overly demonstrative display of kindness would undo her, shred her pride.

She told him in staccato bursts as she sat on a packing crate hugging her knees. Her dog sat at her feet, gazing forlornly at his mistress, all too aware of her pain.

Dwayne listened, nodded, but said nothing.

When she’d told him the basics, Gwen released her knees, got up, walked around the dusty floor. Her boots left imprints.

“I left my pocketbook there,” she finished miserably. “And my phone.”

“He’ll bring it to you. Kind of thing he would do, from all you’ve told me,” said Dwayne, breaking his silence.

“I don’t want to see him again.”

“You say that now.”

“Now’s all there is. Can I stay here?”

“To hide from him?”

Gwen nodded.

“You can’t hide from yourself, Boudy, but you’re welcome to crash here for as long as you want.” Dwayne glanced at Leo. “And your mangy dog.”

She managed a smile. “Thanks, Dwayne.”

102

HIGHWAY 1, 7:35 P.M.

Dan lost the surveillance team with little effort. One car had peeled away, leaving just one vehicle following him. They weren’t first rate, but they weren’t bad either. He added that to the equation. How much time did he have before the intercept was listened to, acted on? A few hours, he hoped. Enough time to get into position. The darkness helped. He gave a grim smile. He had always been best in the dark.

He wished he’d had time to scope out the terrain; he wished he’d anticipated this. Too late for regrets. There was a small dirt track a few miles north of Hurricane Point. No one was tailing him. He had watched all the way, made sure, so he yanked the wheel, swung the Cougar off the road, bumped down the rough track, smiled as he saw the bend, followed it, out of sight of Highway 1. He came to the end of the track, maybe fifty feet above sea level, two hundred feet from the beach. He turned the car, parked tight against a huge bush, heedless of the scratches to his paintwork. Now the car was pointed ready for a quick getaway.

He got out his cell, rang Gwen’s house. No answer. He prayed it was because she wasn’t there. He shut off the engine, shut off the lights, rolled down his windows, listened and looked.

The wind roared, the rain hissed down, help and hindrance, but he heard nothing suspicious. It took two minutes for his eyes to adjust.

He stepped from the car, reached for his kit bag. Still scanning the night, he pulled out a pair of black, toughened leather gloves, thin enough to allow maximum feel for the trigger. He pulled these on. Next he took out his Kevlar knife. This normally came into its own in getting through airport security undetected. It worked well too. He bent down, strapped it to his lower leg under his jeans. He took out the single night-vision goggle, secured it in his jacket pocket. He ignored the Kevlar vest. It was too heavy to fight in effectively, and he reckoned the fighting would be close quarter, unless he were lucky.