“You’re saying she would have shot Chan because he was a traitor?”
“So my theory goes. She knew that Chrissy and Bud had eyes on her from the adjacent room. So if in fact Ali is the shooter, she had to take them out and take their laptops at the same time.”
It was as if I were back in that room, looking at those two young people bloodied and dead on the floor, their power cords still plugged to the wall.
Joe said, “Chrissy and Bud hadn’t overheard any information about the defector’s travel plans. I was on the way up to check in with them, maybe wrap it up for the day— but the elevator took a long time to get down to the lobby floor. When it arrived, everyone standing around piled in. That car must have stopped on every floor.”
Joe ran a hand over his face and seemed to be back in the moment when his operation had come crashing down.
“It was all over by the time I got to the fourteenth floor. The kids were dead in 1418. Alison didn’t answer the door to 1420. I must’ve missed her by minutes, or seconds. Otherwise, she probably would have killed me, too. I learned later that Chan was dead. If my theory is right, she was shutting down her undercover job for us and cauterizing loose ends.”
“But why would she have changed sides, Joe?”
He shrugged. “I can think of a dozen maybes: payback for some long-held grudge, or she got an offer she couldn’t refuse. She’s crazy enough to have done it for the thrill.”
“She might have killed Shirley Chan,” I said.
“OK, yeah. It makes sense if she was mopping up. She wouldn’t take the chance that Chan was playing her and telling everything to his wife. Another sickening theory.”
Joe stopped talking. He turned up the heat, adjusted the airflow, and took a pull from his bottle of water.
My head was throbbing from all this information. I was trying to process it all, thinking that if Muller was a double agent—if it was true—then Joe felt responsible for everything Muller had done. Or maybe Joe, too, was readying himself to cauterize loose ends of his own.
Christ. No one knew where I was. Was I putting my trust in a man I didn’t really know? I shook my head, trying to dislodge that terrifying thought.
Joe said, “I know. It’s unbelievable, and I haven’t confronted her. Maybe I’ve got her all wrong.”
I said, “So why did she come all the way out here?”
“If she’s gone over to the Chinese, BC is not a bad jumping-off point to China. And that’s all I’ve got.”
Joe’s theory had the ring of truth, but was it true?
I asked him—actually, I blurted it out.
“Joe, are you trying to catch Muller, or save her?”
“What do you think?” he said.
CHAPTER 89
THE SIGN AT the side of the road read SQUAMISH.
What little I knew about this town came from an article I’d read in the Chron’s travel section a few years ago about the annual Bald Eagle Festival. I remembered that the area was spread out over a grid of mini-malls and woodsy homes with gorgeous scenery tucked between mountains. Heavily wooded roads connected neighborhoods, and tumbling rivers bisected them, but right now, the scenery was beside the point.
It was lights out in Squamish and there was near zero visibility at oh-dark-hundred.
As we sped through the town, I glanced at Joe’s face, lit by the dashboard lights. I wished I could read his mind, but going by what he’d said, at the center of the crisscrossing facts, suppositions, and violent deaths was Alison Muller. She was clever, manipulative, and, in my opinion, psychopathic.
Was I was finally going to see her for myself? What would happen? Who would still be standing when the sun came up in three hours? Would I see my daughter again?
I had to. I had to stay alive for Julie.
Joe drove the Audi along a two-lane road flanked by forests of black evergreens. There was a bit of a clearing up ahead on our right, and as we approached, he dropped his high beams down to parking lights. I saw a wood-shingled house with a sagging roof and the flash of our lights reflecting off taillights at the end of the driveway.
Joe said, “She’s staying there.”
He continued past the house, and fifty yards down the road, I glimpsed two vehicles parked on either side in deep shadow: a metallic Japanese two-door and a rusty Ford pickup.
“Those are ours,” he said.
Joe tapped the GPS and a new address popped up on the screen. He took a right turn down a dirt road and another right onto a highway through Brackendale. A half mile later, a lighted VACANCY sign flashed outside a Best Western to our right.
Joe turned into the motor court, pulled the car around to the back, and parked between two cars in front of the rooms.
He switched the engine off and used his phone.