Viking (25 page)

He had the bloodhound reconstruct a timeline for each man, using every scrap of data
that seemed even remotely relevant. For Rosales, the picture was studded with detail
all the way back to preschool. Here was the day he’d been immunized for tooth decay;
the first day of kindergarten; his bout with chicken pox; his expenses on the night of
Senior Prom; his scuba certification just before he started college.

Orosco also had plenty of detail in the recent past. But farther back, the picture
was more sketchy. The computer noted that his parents had crossed the border illegally
when he was a child, and had made efforts to minimize their traceability until they
finally became permanent residents.

It was not an unusual profile. Gregory remembered most of it from his earlier
digging. He drilled down into the month Rosales died, stubbornly ignoring the nag of
duty that urged a return to his report-writing, instead of wasting time on a criminal
he’d caught long ago.

There were a few scattered details on Orosco—he’d purchased a condo in California, a
few weeks after fire burned the other man’s apartment to the ground on the opposite
side of the country. He’d gotten a job with a marine salvage outfit out of L.A. And
he’d renewed a library card. Otherwise nothing—not even a bank deposit.

Rosales had left far more tracks on the virtual landscape. He’d emerged from some
sort of undercover assignment to testify at the trial of some prominent politicos
indicted for collusion and money laundering and various flavors of conspiracy. His name
was sprinkled through the news, right along with Samantha Oberling and her partner,
who’d orchestrated the sting.

Gregory’s fingers froze in mid-drum. Rosales knew Oberling. How well? A year
earlier, the computer showed a shuttle trip to Martha’s Vineyard on Thanksgiving
weekend, and noted helpfully that the island was home to Oberling’s parents.

The world wasn’t so small that a Rosales-Oberling-Orosco connection could be
happenstance. How did Orosco get a job as a diver? His timeline provided no clue about
when he might have picked up such a skill. And how about the condo purchase? There was
no financing institution, so where had he come up with that much cash—from his darker
financial connections?

A little coincidence counter in Gregory’s subconscious was beginning to prick
uncomfortably. He still felt confident that he’d nabbed the right culprit, but loose
ends and unresolved questions were unacceptable. The Mendelssohn review would have to
wait.

Frowning, he keyed a request to reactivate and checkout Orosco’s complete file, then
headed off to the bathroom, wondering how he could sell this detour to an irate
manager. When he came back, his clerk was beeping patiently. He lit the screen with a
thumb and glanced at the message, then read the words again with a frown.

“The Orosco file is already active and locked. Checkout is denied.”

On the far side of the park, Julie’s red hair was just visible above a line of
shrubs. She was leaning over a picnic table, deep in conversation with Satler.

The man who had tracked her there looked bored and just a shade sleepy, slumping
behind sunglasses on a cedar-strip bench. He wore a nondescript tee shirt and
knee-length denim shorts, new running shoes, and an old-fashioned but extremely
expensive platinum-plated wrist watch. He was of medium height, well muscled, bronzed.
But there was a hardness to his face, behind the slack mask of rehearsed
inattention.

The headphones he was wearing buzzed intermittently. A passerby with keen ears would
have guessed he was listening to a bubbly DJ or maybe talk radio—and that was just the
assumption observers were intended to make.

Julie’s voice, picked up by ultra-sensitive directional mic, came in with only
minimal distortion. “Of course the FBI can decrypt it. Geire said they’d get right on
it. But I want to see the broadcast myself.”

Satler, seated across from her, sighed in frustration. “I know. But all the
locksmiths want proof of ownership before they go to work. And the code of origin can’t
be faked.”

“You try using your MEEGO ID?”

“I’m not on the list of authorized signers. As soon as a decryption service ran a
check, they’d know I was up to something. And MEEGO would find out.”

“That’s not an option, then.”

Satler shook his head.

“How about the other broadcasts? Couldn’t we take a look at those?”

“Yeah. Most are little bursts that last a few seconds. They probably aren’t worth
our time. But there are a few longer ones we could check.”

“How many?”

“Oh, maybe a couple dozen.”

“Encrypted?”

“Unfortunately. They didn’t compress all that well in the cache.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Well, mainly it’s a bother. Since they’re not from MEEGO, we don’t have to get
permission. But it’s going to look a bit suspicious to ring up a decrypter and say,
‘Here’s a whole wad of transmissions. I know nothing about them, and they’re not mine,
but I need you to crack the code and tell me if they say anything interesting.’ I guess
we could hire a private investigator. They’d look more legitimate snooping,
anyway.”

“Maybe I could try Madison,” Julie mused.

“Madison?”

“A friend at one of the translation bureaus I do business with. She gets documents
all the time from clients and translators. Almost all of them are encrypted, and I’ve
had to call her a few times when a client forgets to pass along their public key. She’s
got to have a standard procedure for this sort of thing.”

“Why don’t you call right now?”

Julie glanced at the time on her phone and shook her head. “She’s on the east coast; they’re
closed for the day. Besides, I have to catch the ten o’clock shuttle back to
Milwaukee.”

The picnic table creaked as Satler stood up.

“Come on, then, I’ll give you a ride to the terminal.”

“I can catch a taxi.”

“Don’t bother. It’ll cost you an arm and a leg, and I can get you there faster
anyway. It’s the least I can do, since you flew all the way down here to Houston.”

Julie nodded a bit uncertainly, and they turned to walk to the parking pad. Her
voice faded, but was still audible over the headphones. “I’ll get Madison tomorrow
morning and let you know what she says.”

Satler rumbled something unintelligible. There was the sound of doors opening and
shutting, then the crescendoing hum of a skimmer’s engines.

The man on the park bench reseated his sunglasses, then shut off the listening
equipment in his tote bag with a casual flick of the wrist. In a minute a shadow
flitted across his shoulders as the skimmer lifted off and shot across the park,
disappearing behind a nearby line of trees.

Without looking, he felt around in the bag until his fingers closed on the
thumb-sized plastic case of a triggering device. He raised the cover and depressed the
smooth circular button, his features expressionless.

The receding hum of the skimmer faltered, coughed, then died. A moment later a
chaotic thud and the welter of rending metal echoed over the park. On the pond, some
ducks flapped their wings uneasily, then settled back to the water again.

* * *

Satler had been shaving a hilltop by the narrowest of margins when the engine died.
The lack of altitude saved their lives.

They dropped like a stone, with not even enough warning to grit their teeth, and
ploughed into the rounded dome of grass in an impact that battered their ear drums. Air
bags and restrainers deployed instantly, cushioning them from the worst effects of the
chassis’s deformation and pinning them so they wouldn’t hurtle forward.

The smashed remnant of the skimmer rolled twice down the lee of the hill, trailing
plumes of greasy smoke in its wake and gouging an ugly earthen scar on the turf, and
finally rocked to a stop. After several heartbeats Julie managed to release her death
grip on the door handle and stop shaking.

Satler had a bloody gash on his forehead, but he looked surprisingly calm. He leaned
over, unsnapped his belt, and then did the same for Julie.

“You okay?” he asked, his voice oddly loud in the hush that had descended.

“I think so.” Her shoulder was numb from a particularly vicious thud during the
rollover, but it didn’t feel broken. “Whoever invented seat belts and air bags deserves
a serious pat on the back. How about you?”

For a moment he appeared not to hear her. His eyes scanned through the shattered
windshield and side windows, his lips intent and thin. What was he looking for?

“I’ll phone for help,” Julie said, realizing with surprise that her purse was still
lying at her feet. How had it stayed put in the tumble? She leaned down and fumbled at
the clasp, her fingers trembling slightly.

“Don’t. We’ve got to get out of here.” He tried to open his door, but even an
intense thrust with his hulking shoulders would not make it budge. The acrid smoke was
mostly billowing up and away, but tendrils stung her eyes and throat.

“Because of fire?”

Satler shook his head and leaned across to smash a beefy palm against her door. It
clicked, sagged promisingly, and caught again. Julie twisted and kicked with her feet
to help him. For a moment they both strained. At last the obstruction gave way, and the
door creaked open on skewed hinges. Julie rolled onto the new-mowed grass, clutching
her purse, and sat up to brush off the clippings. Satler emerged a moment later. He
flopped awkwardly onto the ground belly-first, like a muscle-bound fish.

She had the phone to her ear when his thick fingers closed around her wrist. “Come
on,” he hissed urgently. He hauled her, first indignant, then puzzled, down the hill,
her legs stretching to match his stride.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, but he only held a finger to his lips and
stalked on. Fifty meters from the wreck was a high hedge that bordered a jogging trail.
He ducked behind it furtively, then swung around to face her.

“We can talk here, but keep it down and make it fast.”

“Why, so we don’t wake up all the sunbathers? Our crash made plenty of racket. Why
are you skulking around, and what are you afraid of? We have to call the police or a
wrecker or somebody, at least. For that matter, we ought to be seeing a doctor right
now. We’re lucky the accident didn’t kill us.”

Satler shook his head impatiently. “Lucky for sure, but that was no accident, Julie.
Skimmers don’t have internal combustion engines. There’s no flammable fuel on
board.”

She looked at him in puzzlement, her mind racing. Why did she need a lesson in
remedial mechanics? She knew how a skimmer worked, but the fact was that there
had
been an explosion from the engine. “So what’s your point?”

“I’m saying that whatever caused that explosion will never be traced to a faulty
piece of the engine or a mechanical failure. I’m always tinkering and tuning, and my
skimmer runs like a top.”

Finally the daze from the crash receded enough for the light to dawn, and the
jittery after-shocks in her stomach deepened to full-blown nausea. “You think someone
tried to kill us? But why?”

Satler pursed his lips. “Geire warned you MEEGO would play for keeps.”

“But murder? We don’t even know anything. And how could they find us so easily?”

“If we’re right about the logs, we know they as good as killed some of their crew
the other day. Who knows what else we might dig up? Obviously there’s something going
on. I just can’t believe I
worked
for them!”

“So what do we do now?”

“I think we hide. Whoever sabotaged the skimmer is sure to review their handiwork,
and when they find empty seats they’ll come after us again.”

“Hide where?”

Satler’s face cracked into a weary semi-smile. “That’s the question, isn’t it? I
don’t have a good answer yet, but I know a place where we can at least sit and think
and grab a band-aid. I have a fussy old aunt who lives in a high-rise a few blocks from
here.” He crossed the path and disappeared into thick bushes on the other side.

Julie followed, her mind whirling with images of malevolent stalkers. She had gotten
into this to rescue Rafa, never thinking where it might lead. Now maybe she needed
rescuing. Was it all a stupid mistake?

1291 laid her tiny burden down in the dusty weeds, feeling both frustrated and
embarrassed. She’d been so eager to show the creature to her friends, so sure that they
would congratulate her on a good night’s work.

Instead they proposed to eat it! The dunces! Hadn’t they had enough fish and
sunshine? Couldn’t they think about something besides their bellies? Here was an oddity
unlike any they’d ever seen before, and their meager imaginations charted a direct
course to food.

Her prize had proved far too difficult to apprehend to waste it that way. After a
serendipitous snack of crunchies and its initial retreat to the trees, she’d been
summoned back to the pod by busybody adults, and by the time she returned in the
morning, it was gone. Undaunted, she’d tacked into an easterly breeze and crossed a
couple magnetic bands that day in pursuit—the creature certainly covered a lot of
territory for an earthbound—then scouted patiently until she found the stand of
diminutive saplings where it had bedded down for the night.

She still didn’t understand why it would hide so carefully, yet continue to
broadcast for all the world to hear. Didn’t it realize that anybody with half a mind
could locate it? Well, perhaps not. Clearly the creature had a bizarre physiology, and
behavior to match.

Reaching in under the trees had proved a disaster; her tentacle still smarted from
that mistake. But in the end she’d flushed her quarry and snatched it up before it
could get away. It squirmed for a few minutes, but she’d held tightly until it gave up
and went limp. Not dead—it still chattered away at full tilt, and she’d been careful
not to crush or shock it—but stunned, perhaps.