Redheads (33 page)

So now, Chris was on his way to rent a car. He paid the taxi driver and stepped out on the sidewalk next to Fisherman’s Wharf. There was a Hard Rock Cafe and a Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, both closed this early in the morning. Seagulls stood on the roofs, each balanced on one leg, oblivious to the cool morning rain. Chris could smell sourdough bread in the ovens of a bakery, and then there was the smell of the bay itself, like the water inside a freshly shucked oyster. He walked over to the rail and looked at the sailboats tied up at their docks. The owner of a fifty-foot ketch had left his dinghy in the water, and a young female sea lion had climbed inside to sleep on the floorboards. He had built his entire life around this one task, and had dedicated himself to it daily with a focus that had frightened Mike. But he was not so single minded that he could not dream of a gentler future when the thing was dead. He thought of Julissa diving off the side of a sailboat and into the turquoise water of a lagoon in the Tuamotus, as gracefully as she had plunged into the harbor at Haleolono. He thought of the way she had turned to him, treading water with her hands lightly cupped on her breasts. Chris turned his collar up against the rain, checked his pocket for Julissa’s shopping list, and then headed across The Embarcadero and up Beach Street to the Avis storefront.

After he got his car, he sat in the driver’s seat on the third floor of the parking garage with his computer open on his lap, using Google to track down the things he needed to buy for Julissa. He’d been afraid that for some of the stranger electronics parts, he’d have to drive all the way to Silicon Valley at the south end of the bay, but he found a store on University Avenue in Berkeley that sounded promising. Berkeley was just across the Bay Bridge; he could be there in half an hour if traffic wasn’t bad. He used his satellite phone to call the store, and when he had a clerk on the line, he read down Julissa’s list and confirmed everything was in stock. She’d been up late in the night drawing circuits and doing calculations on her computer. He didn’t entirely understand what she was building, but he knew it would help them find the hacker’s computer.

They didn’t have much of a plan after that. Chris drove out of the parking garage and followed Beach Street to The Embarcadero. Assuming they could get the guy without killing him, they would need a quiet place to do the interrogation. There were isolated areas along the coast just south of the city on Highway 1. They could drive him down there, leave the car at a scenic lookout, and force him down into a gully near the ocean. It would be nighttime and there would be no pedestrians on the highway, and even if there were, the sound of the waves and wind would keep his shouts from reaching the road.

He assumed they would have to hurt him to make him tell them anything, and he thought about that for a while. Here, in cold blood, driving down The Embarcadero in the rain in a rented Chevrolet, he could picture hurting this man. Cutting him with a knife or smashing his fingers to pulp with rocks. What if the hacker turned out to be a woman? That was a complication he hadn’t thought of, and it changed the emotional calculus. If they were to be successful, they’d have to deal with any number of things they’d never planned for.

And then he considered the fact that the whole idea was dependent upon the shaky assumption that the person would either talk willingly or that coercion would make him tell the truth. Chris thought it was fairly common knowledge that a person will say anything to make torture stop. Even if their plan worked, Chris was still concerned about what to do with their man after they’d gotten what they wanted out of him. Killing him would be the most logical thing to do. Any information he gave them would be worthless if he ran off and sounded a warning before they could act on it. What of the tricky question of how tight a leash the thing kept on its pet computer hacker? Did he have to check in every day? Maybe the best thing would be to incapacitate him and then clone his hard drives, search them at their leisure, and never interrogate him at all; surely a hacker would store most of his useful information on a computer drive, and Julissa would find a way to read it.

He thought about these things as he circled up and onto the bridge, crossing the suspension span to Yerba Buena Island and then the second stretch across to Oakland. He had a sense it would be a day of troubling thoughts without real answers. It happened often enough he’d learned to roll with it. But he wished he hadn’t left Julissa alone. He would finish this as fast as he could and get back to her.

In Berkeley, he found parking and walked along University Avenue until he came to the store, which was a dimly lit warehouse of steel shelves and dusty cardboard boxes. He handed Julissa’s list to the college student working as a clerk. He wore a black apron over his street clothes and the nametag on his shirt pocket read
David
.

“I talked to you on the phone. Can you find all this stuff for me?”

David looked at the list and used one finger to push his glasses farther up his nose. “You building some kind of transmitter?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’m just picking this up for a friend.”

The clerk shuffled through the four pages of Julissa’s neatly scripted list and looked up at Chris. “I hope she’s gonna pay you back, because just to warn you, this’s gonna be at least two thousand dollars worth of stuff.”

Chris smiled. “She mentioned that.”

“You wanna go somewhere for about half an hour? It’s gonna take a while to find all this.” The clerk gestured at the store with a sweep of his hand. “This place isn’t exactly in alphabetical order.”

“Sure,” Chris said.

He walked out of the store and back onto University Avenue. It had been ten years since he’d been in Berkeley and he’d never known the town well anyway, so he walked without a plan or a destination. He just wandered. There was plenty to think about. He’d been hoping the police investigating the Intelligene murders would leak something useful, but so far, there’d been nothing. He and Julissa had never talked about how the killer had tracked down Chevalier. After it found Chevalier, it picked up the trail leading to the four of them and their investigation in Galveston. They’d been so busy running from the consequences of that disaster, they’d hardly had a chance to consider how it had come to pass.

Chevalier had emailed some of his results outside of Intelligene—his last letter to them mentioned a researcher at Harvard who’d done isotope hydrology tests on saliva from the fork—so there had been at least one breach to the outside. It was impossible to know how far downstream the information had run. Then there was the chance, which Chris considered more likely, that Chevalier had contacted the FBI. Chevalier couldn’t have known the killer had a direct conduit into that database. He tried to think of any other plausible explanations and couldn’t.

He took out his phone and called the hotel room. Julissa answered on the first ring.

“Yes?” she said.

“It’s me.”

“Okay. God. I was scared when the phone rang. I thought—well, I don’t know. I’m just jumpy.”

“I wanted to check and make sure you’re okay.”

“I’m all right. I’ve got the chain on the door and I kept the butter knife from breakfast this morning because it’s the only thing I’ve got.”

“I’m in Berkeley. I found a store that has everything on the list. The clerk’s getting it together now.”

“Did he know what it’s for?” she asked. Her voice was so gentle on the phone. He thought, again, about the way their bodies fit together when he held her.

“He asked if it was a transmitter.”

“Yeah. It might look like that. Good.”

“Listen,” Chris said. “I had an idea about Intelligene. I think Chevalier might’ve tried to contact the FBI. Maybe he got scared after he thought about what he’d found. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Julissa was silent and Chris could picture her thinking about it, tapping the end of a pencil against her chin and picking his idea to pieces.

“It makes sense. But they can’t be
that
aware of what goes on at the FBI, or they would’ve known about the joint task force looking for them. If they knew about that, why risk of sending those guys into the U.S.?”

“But they didn’t take a risk. The FBI doesn’t have a clue how they got into the country.”

“So you think maybe they know about the task force and they don’t care?”

“It’s a thought. Can you think of any other way he could’ve found out about Chevalier?”

Now he actually could hear her tapping a pen against something, probably the leather-topped desk in the hotel room.

“We know Chevalier emailed that researcher at Harvard, the isotope hydrologist. That guy might’ve spread results to other scientists, and scientists talk a lot. The killer might have a few on his staff somewhere, or might have a few he’s watching.”

“Why would he have scientists on his staff?”

“Maybe he wants to know more about himself.”

Now Chris was silent. Julissa had just hit on something he’d never considered before, and he was disgusted when he found the smallest pull of sympathy for the thing. He saw it out there, alone in the world, wondering:
What am I?
And then on the heels of that thought he had another that was more disturbing still: what if it tracked scientists not because it wanted to know more about itself, but because it wanted to find another creature like it? What if it had some reason to believe that it
wasn’t
alone in the world? Could it be searching for a mate?

“Chris?”

“I’m here.” He paused. “Just thinking. I’ll be back in the city in about an hour and a half. Can I bring you anything besides the stuff on the list?”

“No. I’m okay. Just nervous being in the hotel alone.”

“I’ll be back soon.”

He hung up and continued walking along Berkeley’s side streets, lined with neatly kept professors’ houses. He thought about Intelligene and the killings in Foxborough. There was more to it than they were seeing. Maybe more than they would get from the hacker they were tracking, but he couldn’t see it clearly yet. He put his hands in his pockets and looped around one more block before coming back to the store. The clerk, David, had loaded everything into two cardboard boxes on top of the counter next to the cash register.

“What’s the damage?” Chris asked.

“Worse than she predicted. Twenty seven hundred and change.” He handed Chris an invoice and Chris gave him a credit card.

Driving back into the city, stuck in the traffic at the toll booth to get onto the Bay Bridge, he thought about Julissa alone in their hotel rooms. She had every reason to be scared. They still had no idea how it was tracking them. If it found them the first time, it could find them again. And now they were defenseless because they’d been forced to leave all of their weapons aboard
Sailfish
when they abandoned her on Molokai. They would have to think of a way to protect themselves. It was next to impossible to legally buy a gun in San Francisco. They would have to improvise. He looked at the two heavy boxes on the passenger seat next to him. A solder gun lay atop the plastic-wrapped pile of capacitors and oscillators and god knew what else. At least he could put himself to good use by finding them some weapons while Julissa somehow put all that together.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Westfield was having a hard time staying on his barstool. He was holding on to his drink with both hands and staring down into it, focusing on the disk of liquid that vibrated gently in time to the music. He must have closed his eyes there for a little while, but now he was back and he focused on the drink. When he thought about it, he could remember ordering it a minute ago. It was Jack Daniel’s, neat. Two fingers’ worth in a tumbler, the way he always got it. The bartender was standing at the other end of the bar talking to another customer. There was a voice from the stool next to him, a man asking a question, and he turned and looked at him. Another drunk, sitting on the stool next to his. He looked like he was drinking the same thing as Westfield. Maybe they’d ordered this round together at the same time. Yes, that was it. He remembered it now and turned back to the man. The room spun a little as he turned, the mirror behind the liquor bottles spinning nicely, the neon lights it reflected going into a good swirling blur. This was his favorite part of getting drunk: those fine hours when he was truly wasted, yet capable of drinking infinitely more without any real effect at all until much later when he simply blacked out, usually, but not always, in his own bed. As always, he felt elated to have achieved this state.
I did it!
he wanted to shout. Instead he finished his slow swivel on the barstool and looked at the man next to him.

“You say something?”

“You go away there for a second, pal?”

“Yeah. I guess I did.”
 
He set his drink down.

“You were telling me about your friends.”

He remembered his friends. God, it was good to have people behind him again. Good people he could trust.

“I don’t know where they went. I wish I had their phone number or something. Could get ’em to come over here. Chris is a really good guy. Julissa’s drop-dead beautiful, but she’s got a dangerous mind, you know?”

He reached out with his right hand to pick up his drink. His fingers fumbled it and it almost spilled onto the bar. He looked at his hand and couldn’t quite focus on it, but his fingers looked bent sideways at each knuckle. That couldn’t be right; in fact, that was so fucked up it was almost funny.