But this Ethan Hunt—he glimpsed her briefly and at a distance as she opened the hotel door for her roller-skating accomplice—has played him for a fool. His face burns with embarrassment. A woman has mortified him in front of his people. He feels that his entire crew is secretly laughing at him. Not just his crew. Everyone in the park, the motorists on Ocean Avenue, the scrawny doorman whom he has shoved aside—they are all laughing at him.
When this one fault, this singular weakness, manifests in Kipp Garner, he sometimes loses it and acts irrationally, never for long, for a minute, five minutes. This time, it’s a minute or so during which he grips the stainless-steel handles and pulls-pushes, pulls-pushes the hotel doors, shakes them till it seems they will shatter, the padlock knocking against one of the interior handles, the chain rattling against the glass.
The red haze that clouds his thinking is finally penetrated by Angelina’s voice. “Big guy! Hey, stud, Mr. Big, you’ll want to see this.” She is one of the pretend students from the park, the kind of girl who always knows her place. She came across the street with him and Zahid. She’s waving her smartphone at him, because she’s using an app, one of Jimmy’s best, to track the briefcases. “They’ve gone vertical, big guy.”
This app doesn’t just map-point the transponder and track it horizontal in any direction. It also has something that Jimmy calls three-dimensional cubic-space signal-awareness processing capacity.
Kipp steps back from the doors and looks up at the hotel. “You mean they’re going up?”
“Vertical, yeah,” Angelina confirms.
“Up where?”
“Maybe they’ve got a room here. Otherwise, the roof.”
“There’s nowhere to go from the roof. They’ve got a room.”
28
* * *
THE GARAGE HAD TWO access ramps, one for inbound vehicles, one for outbound. Jane carried the heavy-duty trash bag containing the research she’d ordered, and stocking-footed Nona carried her skates, and they sprinted up the outbound ramp and into the alley behind the hotel. Jane wouldn’t have been surprised to run head-on into some of Jimmy Radburn’s best buddies, but at the moment the backstreet was deserted.
The hotel stood at the north of the block, and midway down the alley, on the farther side, lay a large parking lot that served an office building fronting on 2nd Street. The alleyway provided access; ninety minutes earlier, Jane had moved her Ford Escape from a meter on Arizona Avenue to a visitor slot in the parking lot, the closest space to the hotel that she could find.
Racing along the alley with Nona, she expected to hear shouting behind them, but there was none. In the parking lot, she tossed the trash bag into the backseat of her car, and Nona got into the front passenger seat with her skates, and Jane got behind the wheel, and they were out of there, no pursuit visible in the rearview mirror.
29
* * *
KIPP APOLOGIZES to the doorman for shoving him aside a moment earlier, and he folds a hundred-dollar bill into the man’s hand.
He and Angelina retreat from the portico to the sidewalk as Zahid arrives, limping from his encounter with the Lexus, insisting that he is not seriously injured.
“Apparently they have a room in the hotel,” Kipp says. “They can’t stay in there forever. We need to keep a watch on the front entrance and the back. Bring a car around to—”
“Big guy,” Angelina says, focusing on her smartphone, “they’re coming back down.”
“What?”
“They were pretty high up, maybe one of the top two floors. This app isn’t perfect on the vertical. Now they’re coming down.”
30
* * *
AT THE END of the alleyway, Jane turned left on Santa Monica and then right on 4th Street.
Nona Vincent, formerly a sergeant in the United States Army, now retired, on a weeklong vacation alone from South Carolina, said, “That was the most fun I’ve had in a while. But when I kicked Balloon Guy’s cojones up to his Adam’s apple, I hope I was giving some comeuppance to a bad guy, not a halfway good one.”
“All the way bad,” Jane assured her.
“I told him I can call myself anything I like, but he can’t call me or anyone a dyke. I’m not sure he heard me, ’cause I said it after the kick, when he was off in a world of pain.”
“I’m sure he got the message.”
When Jane braked for a traffic light at the corner of 4th and Pico, Nona said, “So you’re on suspension from the FBI?”
“Yeah,” Jane lied. “Like I said before.” She hadn’t said she was on leave, because she didn’t want to have to go into the whole story of Nick’s suicide.
“Why did you say you were suspended?”
“I didn’t say.”
“You don’t seem rogue to me.”
“I’m not.”
“Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here now.”
“I know. I’m grateful you helped.”
The light changed. Jane drove, Pico to Ocean Boulevard.
“What I figure,” said Nona, “is you were on some corruption case involving a politician, and the powers that be told you to drop it, and you didn’t drop it, so they suspend you till you get your head on straight.”
“You’re psychic.”
“And you’re full of shit.”
Jane laughed. “Totally.”
“But I still think you’re a good woman.”
Nona was staying at Le Merigot, a Marriott hotel with an ocean view, south of the Santa Monica Pier and maybe half a dozen blocks from where she had roller-skated Jimmy Radburn’s testicles. Jane didn’t enter the hotel drive, but stopped at the curb, in the meager midday shade of palm trees.
Earlier, she had given Nona Vincent five hundred dollars with a promise of five hundred more. Now she offered the second payment.
“I shouldn’t take it. You probably need it more than I do.”
“I don’t welch.”
“I shouldn’t take it, but I will.” Nona tucked the five hundred into her yellow sports bra. “When I get back home and tell this story to friends, I can always say I refused to take it.”
“But you’ll tell the truth.”
Nona regarded her with uncharacteristic solemnity. “You have a degree in psychology or something?”
“Something. Listen, those guys will probably split the area, but you shouldn’t go out skating anymore today, ’cause they sure do hold a grudge.”
“It’s my last day, anyway. Hotel’s got a spa. I’ll stay in and allow myself to be pampered.”
Jane held out her hand. “Pleasure to meet you.”
As they shook hands, Nona said, “When the day comes you’re out of whatever mess you’re in, call that number I gave you. I’ll want to hear the whole damn story.”
“Truth is, I’ll throw away the number. If the wrong people found it on me, that might not be good for you.”
Nona peeled one of the hundred-dollar bills from the wad of five and dropped it in Jane’s lap.
Picking up the money, Jane said, “What’s this?”
“I’m paying you to memorize the number. If I never hear from you what this is all about, I’ll die of curiosity.”
Jane pocketed the hundred.
“I’m almost twice your age,” Nona said. “When I was growing up back in the Jurassic, I never imagined the world would get so ugly.”
Jane said, “I never imagined it ten years ago. Or one.”
“Watch your back.”
“Best I can.”
Nona got out of the car. In her stocking feet, carrying her skates, she walked up the hotel drive.
31
* * *
KIPP AND ANGELINA STAND in the hotel garage. By the elevator. They wait almost fifteen minutes. Neither of them speaks as they wait. Kipp isn’t in the mood to talk. Angelina understands his state of mind. As always.
They are simpatico. He trusts her. She never wants to give him a reason not to trust her. He can have any kind of sex with her. Or with other girls. She isn’t jealous. She just wants to be the one he trusts most. Not his only girl. His best girl. His best friend. If sometimes he needs to hurt her, he can hurt her. One day, she will learn where he keeps his biggest stash of cash, and she will be so trusted that when she shoots him in the back of the head, he will go to Hell thinking some hit man has wasted her along with him.
The hotel doorman has connected them to a bellman. The bell captain. Like he’s military or something. The elevator pings. The bell captain appears out of it. He doesn’t look like a bellman. He looks like a doctor. Wise, very serious. White hair. Wire-rimmed glasses. He says, “There were two empty briefcases in the elevator.”