The only computer with an Internet connection was in Gavin’s office. It had a camera. He’d covered the lens with a piece of blue painter’s tape. But rumors abounded that computers made in the past two years, which his had been, contained a second, hidden camera—a so-called Orwell eye—that looked out from behind the screen.
He hadn’t worked today. The computer was off. But it remained plugged into a wall outlet, so that the unit-ID package received a trickle charge, and its locater continuously issued an identifying signal. Did technology exist enabling them to invade his computer, turn it fully on while connecting it to the Internet, and activate its Orwell eye, much as they could turn any telephone mic into a surveillance device?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t risk going into his office.
Three televisions in the house. New models might have been a problem, but they didn’t have new. The small one in the kitchen was probably fifteen years old; it had belonged to Jessica’s mother. Those in the family room and master bedroom were eight years old, bought right after their marriage. No cameras and no Internet capability in those three.
Duke and Queenie raced ahead of him, up the stairs, their lowered tails dragging across the carpet runner, alert to the fact that some crisis was at hand.
Gavin’s smartphone lay on the dresser. He would have to leave it there. Jessie would need to abandon hers as well.
The only phone they would be taking was the burner that Jane had given them. They didn’t dare use it while they might be within range of the sky fisher circling the valley, but eventually they would be in the clear.
Primed for action but finding none immediate, Duke and Queenie departed in a soft thunder of paws, perhaps to seek Travis.
In the back of the clothes closet stood two prepacked suitcases prepared for just such an emergency as this. He set them by the bed.
From the lowest of the three drawers in his nightstand, he took a Galco shoulder system. The harness had a clover-shaped Flexalon back plate that allowed the four points of the suede harness to swivel independently of the others for a tight but comfortable fit, which he quickly achieved. From the same drawer, he withdrew a Springfield Armory TRP-Pro .45 ACP. Seven-round magazine. Five-inch barrel. Thirty-six-ounces loaded. It used to be the FBI’s pistol for their SWAT Hostage Rescue Team, and maybe it still was.
He pulled on a sport coat cut for concealed carry and snatched up the suitcases and went downstairs to the kitchen, where Travis was already standing by the back door with a smaller suitcase of his own. The dogs were with the boy, collared and leashed and standing at attention, tails still and bodies taut.
Jessie was singing “Little Darlin’?” along with the Diamonds on the iPod. She sounded carefree. She wore a woman-friendly belt-fixed rig that allowed the butt of the Colt Pony Pocketlite .380 ACP to ride low on the hip for comfort.
On the table stood a briefcase she’d retrieved from a concealed compartment at the back of the pantry. It contained ninety thousand in cash that Jane had stripped away from various bad guys over the past couple months and had left here, plus another twenty thousand of their own funds they had withdrawn from the bank in small enough amounts to avoid calling attention to themselves, in preparation for just such an emergency as this.
The Diamonds finished their tune, and in the silence between selections, as he went to the back door, Gavin said, “You have the Marcels on deck?”
“Relax, Mr. Romance, ‘Blue Moon’ was our honeymoon song, if you remember.”
“Oh, I do remember. Vividly. Vividly,” he said as Joe Bennett and the Sparkletones came on strong with “Black Slacks.”
He eased open the door and carried the two suitcases outside. Travis stayed behind with Jessie and the dogs, while Gavin hurried to the stand-alone garage near the stables.
16
Although Sanjay knew that he was awake, he felt as if he were moving through a dream or through a sequence in a noir film designed to convey a dreamlike quality. Something directed by Michael Curtiz or Fritz Lang. Maybe John Huston. Pools of light under streetlamps, reminiscent of the hard light focused on suspects being grilled in otherwise shadowy interrogation rooms. The shifting fog suggesting that reality was fluid, that nothing was what it seemed to be, that his motives were shrouded even from himself. And the night, always the night beyond the lamplight, behind the fog. The night resonated with some darkness in himself that brought him here with intentions that, curiously, were revealed to him only one move at a time, as if he were merely a chess piece with no purpose of his own, a pawn animated by some unknown player’s strategy.
When he and Tanuja arrived at the front door, he almost rang the bell, but then realized that he had no need to announce their arrival. From a coat pocket, he removed a key. Perplexed, he stared at it in the soft glow of the stoop light. It lay on his palm as if it had been conjured there. Then he murmured, “The rapist gave it to me last night,” although his words did not relieve his perplexity.
He turned to Tanuja, and her gaze rose from the key to his eyes. “What did you say, chotti bhai?” she asked, raising one hand to the right corner of her mouth.
“I don’t know. Maybe…nothing,” he said. “Nothing that meant anything.”
“Nothing,” she agreed.
Next move: He slipped the brass key into the keyway of the deadbolt, and the lock relented. And then the next: He pushed open the door.
Tanuja crossed the threshold, and Sanjay followed her into a foyer with a golden-marble floor, pale-peach walls, and a modern chandelier with ropes of lighted crystals cascading like dreadlocks.
He quietly closed the door and put away the key and looked around at the matching antique chinoiserie sideboards to the left and right, each bearing a cut-crystal bowl of fresh white roses.
“Mausi Ashima has always had exquisite taste,” said Tanuja.
17
If the plane cruising the valley was what they believed it to be, there was surely surveillance out on the county road, at the entrance to their property, to record whatever vehicles came and went. But Gavin doubted there would be anyone posted closer than that. The gated private lane leading here was over two hundred feet long and flanked by colonnades of old live oaks, which screened the house and other structures from the public highway. To get much closer, the watchers would have to risk being seen; they no doubt preferred to keep their interest secret until they might snatch Jane’s next phone call from the air, track it to its source—and then swoop in to grab the boy.
The garage was a rebuilt barn without windows. Gavin didn’t worry about switching on the lights after he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
The building contained a complete automotive workshop as well as four vehicles, including his prized street rod, an apple-green ’48 Ford pickup that he’d chopped, channeled, and sectioned. She was hot and fast, but she wasn’t suitable for their current escape plan. The ’40 Mercury coupe on which he’d recently begun work was without a functioning engine and lacked wheels. Jessie’s Explorer would have been adequate if Ford hadn’t downsized Explorers years earlier. The getaway fell to the other all-wheel drive, an ’87 Land Rover that he’d rebuilt from near ruin and that contained no GPS locater by which it could be tracked.
He stood on a step stool to lash the suitcases to a roof rack, making sure they were secured enough to stay in place through any adventure other than maybe a double rollover.
When he returned to the kitchen, the Coasters were rollicking through “Yakety Yak,” while Jessie and Travis were talking cards as if they were actually playing Old Maid. For the entertainment of eavesdroppers, Gavin sang a few bars, while he grabbed the boy’s suitcase and Jessie’s blade-runner prosthetics, which he carried to the garage and put on the floor in the backseat of the Land Rover.
When he returned to the house for the last time, the Monotones were fully into “The Book of Love.”
Travis said, “I gotta go to the bathroom.”
“You just went,” Jessie said.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t went enough.”