Mind's Eye (11 page)

“Not at all. You’ve been through a severe trauma.”

“That’s not the way Hector made it seem when he reviewed my case. I got the feeling he’s treated people in some of the rougher neighborhoods who could take a minor bullet wound like this and then play a game of full-court basketball.”

Hall laughed as they entered the building.
“They also weigh more than a hundred pounds,”
he replied.

“I’m not sure it’s entirely a weight thing. I’ve always been a little squeamish at the sight of blood. Especially when it’s my own. I’m glad I was out when Hector treated me. I’ll try to be less of a wimp in the future. I have a feeling I’m going to need to be.”

Hall nodded somberly, but didn’t reply. He had already apologized more times than he could count for dragging her into this, and while becoming injured and a target was horrifying to her, she was a realist. She was in this now whether she liked it or not, and wasting focus or emotional energy lamenting her position would reduce her chances of making it out the other end. She was taking this better than Hall had any right to hope she would, for which he was thankful.

They entered the station, which was a combination of mint green steel beams, glass, and red brick walls, and he carefully sat Megan in one of the padded chairs that were linked together in rows, spreading the bright blue fleece blanket he had taken from the ambulance over her lap. The station was really beginning to bustle, and Hall guessed that Friday after work hours was one of the busiest times for train and bus travel.

 “Don’t go away,” he said, moving into the scattered crowd.

Five minutes later he was back. “I was checking out schedules,” he explained as he returned.

“Where are we going?” asked Megan.

“I don’t know. We can afford two train tickets to Merced, Fresno, or Hanford. Or two bus tickets to San Bernardino or Perris. They all leave within the next hour.”

“No trips to larger cities? I’d think the bigger the city, the easier it would be to lose ourselves.”

“There’s a train leaving for LA and a bus to San Francisco in this time frame, but we can’t afford the tickets. Not if we want to have enough cash left over for a hotel. Remind me to steal from richer people next time,” he added with a grin. “Which brings to mind a quote from Margaret Thatcher: ‘Socialism is great—but eventually you run out of other people’s money.’”

“So you remember a quote from Margaret Thatcher, but you can’t remember anything about who you are?”

“I’m afraid that’s how this seems to be working,” replied Hall.

Megan nodded toward her purse, which Hall had placed beside her on an empty seat. “I have a Visa with a five thousand dollar credit limit. So money isn’t a problem.”

Hall paused in thought. “Won’t they be able to trace it?” he asked. There was no need for him to specify who he meant by
they
.

“Not nearly as easily as the movies would have you think,” said Megan.

Hall frowned. He had learned that knocking someone out with the butt of a gun, without actually killing them, wasn’t as easy as movies would have you think, either. Wow, he thought sarcastically, if you couldn’t trust Hollywood . . .

“For them to access my Visa information in real time,” continued Megan, “they’d have to have some major credentials. Or very impressive capabilities.”

“You’re probably right. But I think we’d better assume they’ll be able to, just to be on the safe side.”

A few seconds later a sly smile spread over his face. “But maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe we can turn this in our favor.”

“How?”

“What if I buy us two tickets to eight or nine different destinations. Even if they’re able to pull the Visa records and see all eight or nine, so what?”

“We’re going to be busy little travelers, aren’t we?” said Megan in amusement. “Good thinking. If that doesn’t confuse our followers, nothing will.” She paused. “Wait, I have another idea,” she added excitedly, shifting positions abruptly as she did so, which turned out to be a mistake. A look of nausea swept over her face, and she grabbed the arm of the chair for support and closed her eyes.

“Are you okay?”

Megan took a deep breath. “Yeah. Got dizzy. Still a little lightheaded, I guess.”

She looked up at his concerned face, more deliberately this time. “As I was about to say, let’s choose a destination. You go and buy tickets to the
other
eight or nine places that we
didn’t
choose using my credit card. Then, just before we leave, I buy tickets to our
real
destination in cash. That way, if they can access my purchase records, we’re not giving them a bunch of false leads and one real one. We’re giving them
all
false leads.”

“Very clever. You seem to have a knack for this.”

Megan reached inside her purse, opened her wallet, and handed Hall her Visa card.

“So where do you want to go?” asked Hall. He reeled off the destinations he had already mentioned once again. “Any of these sound good?”

“Is there really a Paris, California?”

“I guess so. But it’s not spelled like the one you’re thinking of. It’s fairly near here. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it.”

“I only moved here a few months ago from LA,” she explained. “I have to say, though, I’ve always wanted to go to Paris. Although something tells me the one in California might be just a
hair
less romantic than the one in France. Maybe it’s the spelling.”

Hall grinned. “I guess the Paris in France is for lovers. The Perris in California . . .  Well, let’s just hope it’s good for fugitives.”  

Megan flashed an incandescent smile. “I’m game,” she said. But just as Hall was about to leave to begin purchasing tickets, she stopped him. “I just had a thought, Nick. We can go to LA, after all. We don’t have cash for a hotel, and we wouldn’t want to use my credit card, but I have friends we can stay with.” 

“
No!
” snapped Hall, and then instantly regretted taking this tone. “No,” he repeated more pleasantly. “We can’t bring anyone else into this. I would have never guessed they’d find out I was in your office—and they did. We can’t risk your friends’ lives.”

“You’re right,” she said softly. “I wasn’t thinking. Let’s stick with Perris. How much time do you think we have?”

“That bus leaves in thirty-eight minutes, exactly,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows. “You didn’t know which destination I would choose. Are you telling me that you memorized the departure times for all possible choices?”

“Not at all. I’m just taking advantage of the personal web access in my head. I signed up for a free notebook app while I was reading the schedules. One with plenty of storage in the cloud. I figured it would be helpful to
think
information to this app. So I can see the cities and times for each trip in my, um . . . mind’s eye, so to speak. I’ve added a small digital clock at the bottom of any page I call up, so I can get the precise time whenever I want.”

Megan looked impressed. “So when you said thirty-eight minutes, you didn’t mean thirty-seven or thirty-nine, did you?”

“No. And the web has endless calculators, so I can be precise with respect to much more difficult calculations than this.”

Hall left once again, this time returning with tickets to nine destinations, not including Perris. They were waiting patiently for five minutes prior to departure, when they planned to purchase two tickets with cash, when a train and bus pulled into the station at the same time, both packed with passengers who were now disembarking. Added to the ever-growing crowd in the terminal waiting to leave, the increase in chatter in Hall’s mind was maddening. He suspected if he ever found himself in a dense concentration of people, like inside a football stadium during a big game, his sanity would be a quick casualty.

The chairs on either side of them began to fill in with passengers. Hall put his head in his hands and tried not to scream. Now the noise was coming through his ears as well as his mind.

A kid wanted some candy. A man was fantasizing about sexual acts he would perform with his girlfriend when they reached their destination. A couple was arguing about who worked the hardest. A man was tallying up how much he stood to lose financially if he divorced a wife he now despised. It never ended. A woman who was about to visit her mother for three days was freaking out, trying to remember if she had shut the garage door when she left, and deciding to call a neighbor, just to be sure.

Hall almost bolted upright as he read this thought. He extended his mind, this time entering the minds of anyone who was departing Bakersfield. The buzzing was still intolerable, but at least he now had a purpose. Five minutes later he rose and faced Megan Emerson.

“Change of plans,” he said, reaching for her hand to help her up.

13

Vasily Chirkhoff arrived just before midnight at the Bakersfield Municipal Airport in a small chartered jet, and Cody Radich met him and escorted him to his rental car. While the Russian had been in transit, Radich, with the help and resources of John Delamater, had made significant progress in picking up Hall’s trail once again.

WeOfficeU had long contracted with the Adams Janitorial Services company to send a two-person crew to their Bakersfield location each night after hours, with responsibility for cleaning the bathrooms and conference rooms, vacuuming out each of the two hundred and ten offices, and emptying the individual trash containers in each.

Only four hours earlier, a woman named Larissa Hochhalter, who was one half of this crew, had been covering the same ground at WeOfficeU she had covered for years. During this period of time she had thought she had seen it all. She had interrupted office residents having sex, had come across managers passed out drunk, and offices that had been literally torn to pieces by irate wives or lovers. But when she had entered Megan Emerson’s office to vacuum, minding her own business, she encountered something that even
she
couldn’t take in stride.

After she had stopped screaming, she had called 9-1-1 to report two very dead bodies resting comfortably on the floor, with patterns of blood leakage and spatter that were like demented modern art.

Delamater had learned of this only minutes after the Bakersfield police had been notified, and Vasily continued to be impressed with the wide variety of sources he had cultivated. Although, in this case, Delamater had probably recruited a single player with access to the national police computer system, and had set up the system to alert him to anything of possible interest in the vicinity of Bakersfield. In this instance, though, they didn’t need outside intel. Vasily and Delamater already knew their hired guns were dead at this location.

The men had called Vasily from WeOfficeU to give them Megan Emerson’s identity, but had never called back. And repeated attempts to contact them had failed. Vasily tracked their cell phones, and learned the phones hadn’t moved a millimeter in hours. Either they had both left their phones behind in the office, which was so unlikely as to defy imagination, or they were recently deceased.

The fact that Nick Hall had prevailed against
two
experienced killers this time was becoming alarming. At first Vasily had tried to convince himself the man just had a six-leaf clover in his pocket. But after this, he agreed fully with Delamater that they were missing something big.

They had been caught off guard by this development and didn’t have a crew ready to retrieve the bodies and scrub the premises, which would have been a challenge in a locked office building in any case. And who knew how many bullet holes, and how much blood, would have to be concealed and cleaned.

Had they removed the bodies they might have been able to delay an investigation, but not forestall it entirely. And this move, as well as others they had contemplated, like torching the entire building, added more risk than benefit. No matter. They always retained the capability of remotely frying the phones of anyone in their employ, which they had done to the two phones long before they were discovered. The mercs wouldn’t be carrying any identification, and they couldn’t be traced in any way to Vasily Chirkhoff or John Delamater.

Now they just had to be sure to stay at least one step ahead of whoever would be investigating the murders. Given that they had started
many
steps ahead, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Radich and Vasily had traced Megan Emerson’s phone to the Kern River Motor Lodge, and from there, with a little investigative work by Radich, they learned of the ambulance that had made a visit there, and of the woman and man who had left in it. A pair who matched the descriptions of Nick Hall and Megan Emerson. The girl was wounded, although the severity of her injury had not been clear. Apparently, Hall had played the Boy Scout and had stuck around to help her.

What an idiot
, thought Vasily in frustration.
What a soft, sniveling idiot
.