She goes away to the Crestron panel in the bedroom. Tones sound as she enters the code, and the recorded voice says, “Control is disarmed.”
When she returns, she draws a pistol from under her sport coat. She stands over him, the weapon at arm’s length, the muzzle no more than a foot from his face.
He has given her the safe code. He knows that no armed response will be coming. Nevertheless, whether five or ten minutes, that wait is the longest hour of his life.
1
* * *
IN VIRGINIA, NATHAN SILVERMAN stayed an hour later than usual in his office so that he could review again the edited and compiled video from Palisades Park in Santa Monica and from the hotel, which had come in from L.A. late in the afternoon.
The hotel cameras were confined to a limited number of interior public spaces, but the video was high definition.
Here is Jane at the lobby entrance, back to the camera. She opens the door. The Amazon skates inside carrying two briefcases and makes her way directly to the elevator alcove. Jane chains and padlocks the front doors. Here is Jane joining the skater at the elevators. Into the cab. The garage as they step out of the cab. The skater carries her skates. Jane carries a trash bag. The two women racing up the ramp.
They must have had a car in the alleyway or somewhere nearby. Sensitive about being accused of violating the privacy of the public, the hotel had not mounted a camera in the alley. The city had no coverage there, either. Where Jane and the skater had gone from that point was unknowable.
The park video and traffic-cam footage came from cheaper, older cameras with dust-filmed lenses. The quality of the images was poor. The video would have to undergo considerable, patient enhancement if there was to be any chance of identifying the various players.
One thing, however, was clear beyond dispute: Jane had set up a swap of some kind in the park, and she had feared a trap. Judging by the number of people associated with the man bearing the briefcases and the metallic balloon—HAPPY, HAPPY—she was right to expect a double cross.
Silverman had not yet assigned these inquiries a case number. Initially, he, himself, would be the special agent in charge.
Neither had he alerted the director to the possibility of an agent having gone rogue. Nothing was worse. The Bureau had to come down hard on any individual who would wear its name but break the laws that she was sworn to uphold. If the charge was lodged but then proved false, Jane would nevertheless be stained forever by the mere accusation, and her life, already fractured by the loss of Nick, would be shattered.
In his mind’s ear, he heard the voice of Gladys Chang: She wasn’t afraid for herself. She was scared for her sweet hummingbird, her little boy.
This was Friday. Investigations of crimes continued 24/7, but in cases where no lives hung in the balance and national security was not an issue, the Bureau cranked down the intensity of its work on Saturday and Sunday. Nathan could justify putting a pin in the matter of Jane Hawk until Monday.
What he did during the next seventy-two hours, however, might seal his own fate even as he worried about hers. He and Rishona had reservations for dinner at a favorite restaurant in Falls Church. He would share with her all his thoughts about what steps to take next in this matter. After all, if he walked a long way out on a limb, he was taking Rishona with him. If at the moment there wasn’t anyone with an intention to saw that particular limb off behind him, there would most likely be one by sometime next week. When you acted on principle tempered by compassion, there was sooner or later always someone with a saw.
He drove home through lighter traffic than expected.
The weather had taken a turn toward an early spring.
Twilight was a magical Maxfield Parrish shade of blue.
The stars seemed to be born moment by moment as they appeared sequentially in the darkling heavens.
And just the previous night, the rain gutter that he repaired had not collapsed in the storm.
Perhaps fate was at the moment on his side to such an extent that taking a long walk on a limb would be worth the risk.
2
* * *
ALTHOUGH MONEY COULDN’T BUY happiness, driving a Bentley calmed an agitated mind. The rush hour in greater L.A. was at least four hours long, and this state that built the greatest highways in the nation now rated last in the quality of its roads. In Overton’s Bentley, the rudeness of ill-maintained pavement was rendered almost mythical by a suspension system that smoothed away all shocks.
And there, Jane thought, was the problem with a man like Overton. Wealth had not corrupted him. What he’d chosen to do with his wealth corrupted him. First he insulated himself from ordinary human experience, and then deemed himself superior to the masses, excused himself from all constraints not only of morality but also of tradition, and subsequently felt justified in casting off his conscience as a worthless artifact of primitive and superstitious minds. He had made of himself a malignancy in the human community.
Although the smooth ride in the Bentley planed away the rough edges of her agitation, it did not diminish her indignation, which seemed to be condensing into cold, hard wrath.
The local Aspasia was located in an area of unincorporated county land adjacent to San Marino, a lovely community of grand old homes and estates next door to Pasadena. The Bentley’s GPS talked Jane there in the same uninflected tones with which it would help her find her way to a bookstore or a church.
According to Overton, the facility—how deeply she despised the evasion represented by that word—occupied a reconstructed mansion on three acres. The voice of the GPS advised her to turn left off a quiet suburban street, and she braked to a halt in a driveway, the headlight beams splashing upon a pair of ten-foot-high iron gates heavy with decorative radials and scroll work. Nothing of the house or grounds could be seen from beyond the property. The gates stood between sections of a ten-foot stacked-stone estate wall graced with ivy and crowned with spear-point iron staves.
The mailbox offered no name, only the street number.
When Jane powered down the window to look at the call box, she could see no watchful lens. Apparently, as Overton had promised, no camera was associated with the gates, either.
Using the oversized keyboard on the call box, she entered the four digits of Overton’s membership number followed by his password—VIDAR—which was the name of the Norse god who survived Ragnarok, the war to end all things and all other gods. As the immense gates began to swing inward, she wondered if all these power-mad fools gave themselves the names of pagan gods.
She drew the Heckler & Koch, screwed the sound suppressor to it, and put the weapon on the passenger seat, within easy reach.
Considering Overton’s circumstances when she had grilled him, and the suffering he would endure if she didn’t return, Jane doubted that he had deceived her. Security guards programmed not to see members would at one time have struck her as an absurd lie, purest fantasy, but she remembered the regimented mice in Shenneck’s video.
Before her waited not just a property to reconnoiter, not just an investigation to be conducted. Before her lay something new and terrible and still unknown in spite of all that she had learned.
Apprehension gripped her, and she hesitated to proceed.
But there was nowhere else to go. To anyone who didn’t know her well, her story would be taken for the ravings of a paranoid. And friends who might believe her, even if they were in a position to provide help, might pay with their lives for doing so.
Overton knew more than he’d told her, but he wouldn’t willingly tell her more. She did not have it in her to torture him, to twist more out of him with pliers, carve it out of him with blades.
She reached into a pocket of her sport coat and brought out the silver oval in which was embedded a carved-soapstone profile of a woman. Half of a broken cameo locket.