Ten minutes from Fashion Island in that stop-and-go traffic, she came to a halt when a traffic light yellowed to red, with ten or twelve vehicles in front of her. Directly ahead idled a landscaper’s open-bed truck full of mowers, blowers, trimmers, rakes, and white tarps plump with grass clippings.
She didn’t want to do what she knew she was going to do, what she believed she had to do. After she tried the power button twice again, without success, she closed the laptop, opened the car door, got out, and hurried forward to the open-bed truck. She flung the computer over the tailgate, darted back to the Honda, got behind the wheel, and pulled shut the door without looking at any of the people in the cars around her, who might have been interested in knowing what she’d just done and why. Let them wonder. It was California; you never knew what anyone might do next.
She had hoped the laptop would tumble in among the gardener’s equipment, but it landed smack in the middle of one of the large marshmallow-looking tarps bulging with clippings. As if it were on display.
The traffic signal didn’t change fast enough to suit her. She couldn’t guess what might happen next, but she knew for sure that when the big boot came down, aimed at your neck, it was better to be on the move than sitting still.
Did the latest models of computers emit an identifying signal even when they were switched off? Could someone in authority reach out to that signal and activate your laptop? The newest model TVs included cameras that watched the viewer and microphones that could listen, to allow interactive entertainment. It was a negative-option component; you got it whether you wanted it or not, and you had to take active steps to cancel those features. Not that it necessarily disconnected when you were told it did. Who knew? If someone in authority could reach out and switch on your laptop, and if the laptop contained a transponder with an identifying number, then it was like a flashing neon sign announcing HERE SHE IS, COME AND GET HER!
The signal turned from red to green, and traffic began to move, but Bibi thought it would probably never again, for as long as she lived, move as fast as she wanted. The throng of vehicles, spaced like beads on a necklace, progressed as far as the next intersection, at the crown of a hill, before halting again. She was now six or eight places from the commanding light, and the landscaper’s truck remained in front of her.
She heard the bass throbbing only a moment before the helicopter soared over the brow of the hill, immense in visual impact if not in fact, flying about sixty or seventy feet above the roadway, far below legal minimum altitude for the circumstances. It wasn’t a standard two-or four-seat police chopper, and it wasn’t a humongous military job, but rather a sleek blue-and-white corporate craft, what Pax would call a “medium twin,” powered by two engines, with an eight-or nine-passenger capacity. High-set main and tail rotors. Advanced glass cockpit. Maybe eight or nine thousand pounds of machine and fuel, coming at her like a missile, framed in her windshield, seeming lower than it actually was. The engine noise and the air-slam of the rotary wing escalated instantly to a violent roar as the chopper passed overhead, then diminished as it swept downhill, above the lanes of waiting vehicles.
Red winked to green, and the steel-Fiberglas-rubber sludge began to move once more, across the brow of the hill. Bibi said “Yes!” and slapped the steering wheel when the landscaper’s truck turned right, off the boulevard and away from her.
Crossing the intersection, she checked the rearview and side mirrors, didn’t see the helicopter, but then heard it approaching from behind. The volume didn’t grow as loud as it had before, because the craft turned north and gained a little altitude to clear some old trees. She glanced right and saw it disappear as if in pursuit of the landscaper.
As slow and inept as she had felt now and then during the past eighteen hours, she now felt quick and clever. Nevertheless, she warned herself, nothing in this game was ever easy. And she was right about that.
The vast acreage of the parking lot was sometimes insufficient for the crowds drawn to Fashion Island, but this time Bibi had many choices. Near Neiman Marcus, she tucked Pogo’s pride between a red Ferrari and a silver Maserati, accomplishing two things at once: by contrast calling attention to the Honda and thereby making it appear that its driver had no reason to want it to pass unnoticed; and at the same time giving the owners of the flanking vehicles a reality check, in the event they needed one.
She pulled her hair back in a ponytail and secured it with a rubber band that she carried in her purse for that purpose. After she put on the sunglasses, she wished that she had a more complex disguise. Like a burka. No one would profile and bother a woman in a burka, even if she was radioactive and ticking.