The Nature of the Beast (19 page)

Michael hesitated for a moment and then nodded. When the man suddenly started his way, Michael flinched and quickly stepped to one side.
He watched as the man pushed buttons on the box, watched as the light went from red to green and then heard the snap of the lock.
The man pulled the door open wide.
“
Go,
”
he said.

Michael sidled through the doorway.
The moment the kid was outside, he took off running and disappeared from sight.

He stood and listened to the sound of slapping feet until his ears could make out nothing but the hiss of the wind. He closed the door.

Through the front window, he could see that Michael, having given up on the gate, was now checking the perimeter, running along the fence line looking for a way out.
He remembered doing the same thing a long time ago when they used to come here.
He remembered checking the fence, over and over,
looking for a way out, but finding nothing.
He remembered watching for the mail lady and hoping she would put stamps on him and send him somewhere, somewhere far away and exotic. But she never came closer than the road.
Never.
Not once.

By the time he
’
d found himself a dry set of clothes and tidied up, Michael had been outside for half an hour. A perfunctory search of the yard found Michael folded up behind an ancient hay rake on the south side of the barn. His camouflage theory seemed to be that if he couldn
’
t see his pursuers, they couldn
’
t see him.

The man sauntered up and stood over the boy.
“
C
’
mon, I
’
ll show you your bunk.
”

“
What
’
s a bunk?
’

He gestured to follow.
“
I
’
ll show you.
”

Michael hurried along behind him.
They crossed the frozen back yard together.

“
After breakfast you
’
ll have your bath.
”

Michael scrunched up his face.
“
It
’
s daytime,
”
he protested.

“
A clean recruit is a happy recruit,
”
the man said as he unlocked the door and ushered the boy inside.

34

The harsh glare of the overhead lights accented her Marilyn Manson eyeliner and, along her jaw line, where the make-up ended and her real skin began, she looked as if she’d been hastily spray-painted. All of which seemed rather at odds with the Prada pumps and the black Sosperi eyeglasses which, by themselves, must have set her back two grand. Obviously, a woman of extremes.

The lawyer was a Beverly Hills land shark, Sheldon W. Spearbeck, Attorney at Law. The kind of clothes-horse you kept on retainer for DUIs and domestic violence beefs but not the sort of high-roller you’d want to go into court with. In this part of the world, however, the guys you
would
go into court with didn’t show up in Secret Service Interview Rooms unless your name happened to be Lindsey Lohan.

Spearbeck did his lawyerly duty and reiterated the agreement. Twice. No charges whatsoever, no DNA samples, no official record of any kind. They would talk only about the client in question, and would willingly cooperate with the creation of a composite image of the suspect. They would walk out together when the interview concluded. No post interview surveillance. So long. Goodbye.

Theoretically anyway. Truth was, NSA’s new ‘Exponential Variant’ software had already identified both her individual programming signature and her personal history. Nancy Burell. December 4, 1960. Mother Coleen died in childbirth. Raised by a single physicist father in Palo Alto, California. Timid and withdrawn as a child, she had grown into an unusually angry young woman whose intellectual gifts kept a borderline personality disorder at bay until 1977, when she was asked to leave Cal Tech after having been suspected of altering post-doctoral evaluations. After segueing through a series of increasingly sensitive ‘encryption’ positions in a number of think tanks and commercial settings, she completely dropped out of sight five years earlier.

Although she wasn’t aware of it, disappearing was no longer an option. From this moment on, she belonged to NSA. The first time they had a situation from which they needed to keep their distance, something that seemed to be up her alley, they’d pressure her into providing the service. That’s how it worked. And so on and so on until she’d outlived her usefulness and was allowed to skulk off into the cyber sunset.

Made it easy for Craig to agree. “Okay,” he said.

She looked bored to death. “Shoot.”

“Why me?” he asked.

“You were the one I couldn’t get a smell of,” she said. “ And he just
had
to have all three of you.” She shrugged. “I told him…somebody drops off the grid like that it’s because he’s seriously connected. Whoever cleaned up after you knew what he was doing. I told him the truth…finding you was going to be a problem.” She thought about smiling but thought better of it. “He almost seemed relieved. Like he could tell himself he’d done what he could and was willing to let it go at that. When I told him you were coming back to the states it seemed to catch him by surprise. Like he’d just been going through the motions and now he was going to have to actually do something. “

Craig paused to digest the information. “How long ago did you find Special Agents Wald and Fowles?”

“Assuming that my client...” Spearbeck piped up. “…hypothetically speaking, of course…”

“Four years,” she said with a smile. “But like I said, he didn’t want to do anything unless he knew where to find all three of you.”

“My client is merely an information conduit,” Spearbeck asserted. “What the end user does with that information is not within her purview.”

“You said you’ve met him in person?” Craig segued.

“Three times over the years,” she said.

“Do you generally meet your clients face to face?” Craig pressed.

“He’s the only
living
client I’ve
ever
met in person,” she said. “He saved my life.” Big sigh. Wry smile. “In Chicago, five years ago next month.”

“Tell me about it,” Craig said, folding his hands on the scarred tabletop.

“I’d just gone into business for myself,” she explained.

“What business was that?”

“Technical Support,” she said with a smile.

She shrugged and went on, relating how she ‘researched’ potential clients before saying yes or no to an assignment. This one was a minor mobster named Charlie Cook. Cook owned a couple of dry cleaners over in Gary, but actually paid the bills working as muscle for a couple loan-sharking operations. Had quite a record. Nothing too serious, mostly minor, but enough of them to get him a third-strike jacket if he wasn’t careful. He wanted to know if I could annex and make improvements to City of Chicago and State of Illinois court records.”

“And you told him…” Audrey pressed.

“I told him I could hack anything. You want me to take on the pros…that’ll cost you extra.”

She anticipated the next question. “How he got my number I have no clue. I’d only been freelancing for a couple months. I guess somebody must have liked my work. It’s a word of mouth business. I don’t ask. They don’t tell.”

“Anyway,” Audrey prompted.

The woman felt a need to explain. “I was stupid. Naive. I let him talk me into meeting in person.” She took a deep breath. “I’m staying in this fleabag rental over by the convention center.”

She sensed she was going into unnecessary detail and stopped. “Anyway, Cook shows up, I let him in, expecting to be thanked for my services and handsomely paid and the minute the door closes that son-of-a-bitch throws a silk scarf over my head and starts to choke the life out of me.” She swallowed hard, reliving the incident.

“So?”

“So we’re staggering all over the entrance hall, locked in this death dance. I can feel my lights going out, my head feels like it was going to explode when, all of a sudden we crash against the door, which somehow or other hadn’t latched properly when he came in and we go tumbling out into the hall together.” She caught her breath and continued. “We’re locked together, Cook on the bottom. If I hadn’t somehow gotten my hand between my throat and the silk scarf, I’d have been dead by then. And suddenly there he was! This kid standing there in the foyer gawking at us. A gangly-looking teenager in a beige trench coat.”

“What was he doing in the building?” Craig asked.

She laughed out loud. “Visiting his doctor. If you can believe that.”

“Go on.”

“So I guess Cook can sense my lights are just about out, so he lets go of the scarf and goes after the kid.” She unfolded her arms and held up a restraining hand. “I couldn’t see exactly what happened next. My vision was big time screwed up from the choking and Cook was between me and the kid but…” She paused for effect. “…like two seconds later this guy Cook is lying next to me on the floor with a knife sticking out of his eye.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that, dead as a herring,” she said. “Like some kind of street magic trick.”

She paused again, remembering. “So the kid tows both of us back into the apartment. I’m choking and gagging trying to get some air into my lungs. That’s when I see that the kid’s got this big, deep cut running across his palm. Somehow, in the process of killing Cook he got cut. He’s got the hand pressed against his chest and he’s still bleeding like a pig.” She took a couple of shallow breaths. “That’s when he reaches over with his good hand and pulls the knife out of Cook’s eye and I just start babbling cause I know I’m gonna be next and I’m bawling and begging for my life when he spots a little sewing kit on my kitchen table.” She looked from Craig to Audrey Williams and back. “You know what he wants me to do?” She didn’t wait for an answer.

“He wanted me to sew him up, right then and there.” She shook her head in wonder. “Never so much as blinked the whole time I was working that needle in and out of his hand. Just stood there and talked to me like nothing was going on. Asked me what I did, so I told him. Asked me if I was good at it. I told him I was.” She shrugged. “Wasn’t like I had anything to lose at that point. I figured I was dead, so I offered him some antibiotics and pain pills I had with me. I was doing everything I could think of to stay alive and I finally get him sewed up and he looks at me and he asks me for a number where he can reach me.” She brought a hand flat against her chest. “You could have knocked me over. He calls me a couple of months later. Gives me three names. Wants me to find out where they are.”

“And?”

She shrugged. “I got lucky,” she said. “I find the other two right off the bat but still can’t get so much as a sniff of you. He hands me a stack of money, tells me to keep looking and to keep him posted. Then you started calling your sister…” She shrugged.

“Describe him,” Craig pressed.

“White. Early to mid twenties now. Not quite six feet. Medium build but strong. Dark brown buzz cut hair.

“When was the last time you spoke to him?”

For the first time in the interview, she hesitated. Craig repeated the question.

“Earlier this week,” she said finally.

“Where?” Craig asked.

Her lawyer objected. “Not relevant,” he said. “We agreed…”

“Arizona.”

From six feet away, Audrey could feel the anger rising in Jackson Craig. The indignation and bitterness over Gil and Emelda. She reached beneath the table and put a clammy hand on his knee. He snapped an angry glance in her direction, but didn’t pull his leg away.

“To warn him not to use the Witness Protection identities you got for him?”If she was surprised, she didn’t let on. “Hypothetically,” was as far as she was willing to go.

“This technical support of yours, “ Craig began. “What did it consist of?”

“Viable identities…documentation…client research…” She hesitated again.

Craig was on it in an instant. “I remind you that your end of our agreement was to be both truthful and inclusive. If you expect us to honor our commitment, I’d suggest you live up to yours.” An air of menace crept into the room. Spearbeck put a paternal hand on her arm. She shook it off.

“Once I found them, I made virtual visits to the people he wanted researched,” she said.

“Virtual?”

“I installed Trojan codes onto their computers,” she said.

“To what end?”

“So I could control the computer cameras.”

“The computer cameras?”

The woman nodded. “Audio too. Then I re-routed the feeds to him and turned the little green lights off.” She sat back in her chair with an ‘easy as could be’ look on her face. “Most people leave their computers open,” she said. “You’d be surprised how much you can learn about people just by watching their day-to-day lives. Gives my clients a nice little edge,” she added with a smirk.

Audrey worked to keep her jaw from dropping onto the table. She made a mental note to stow her laptop in a closet when she wasn’t using it and then swore another more heartfelt oath to never carry it into the bathroom with her again. The idea of such an easily accomplished intrusion into her private space sent a shiver rolling down her spine.

“Anything else?” Jackson Craig asked.

“I provided software that would tap him into the City of Chicago surveillance camera system.” She checked the shine on her fingernails. “What can I say? He’s got a thing about cameras. He thinks they’re spying on him.” She looked around the table. “Which of course, they are.”

Audrey was incredulous. “You can do that?”