Active Shooter (8 page)

***

The Rioja bottle now dispatched, mostly via
Lucia's glass, she poured herself another glass from a bottle of
Zinfandel -- her favorite, as she'd announced upon popping the
cork.

"She's coming to pick up later?" Lucia asked,
referring to the call from Bridget I'd just received.

"Yeah."

"I couldn't help overhear. Something about
her bringing her stuff over to your place."

"Yeah."

“You sure it's a good idea for her to stay at
your place tonight?” Lucia asked as she closed the dishwasher.

Her question took me aback. At first Lucia
had seemed put off by Bridget's sudden refusal to join us. But then
she'd said it gave us more time to chat one on one, review the four
photos I'd brought and to discuss business. Her direct expressed
concern over Bridget spending the night at my place seemed
misplaced.

“Afraid she'll steal my photos?” I asked.

Lucia made a face. “Afraid you don't know her
all that well is more like it.”

“I've known her a little longer than I've
known you.”

She raised her hands. “Alright. My bad. None
of my business.”

“No, please. Go on. I appreciate a little
female intuition in my life.”

Lucia lowered her head and looked up at me
through her dangling bangs. “You really want me to play big
sister?”

“Sure.”

“OK. I may be the first letter in LGBT and
all that, but I can see you're an attractive guy. Smart, too. A
catch for many a chick out there, right?”

“If you say so.”

“For most chicks, I'd say. Yeah.”

“But not that chick.”

“Hmm. Not so much. That chick has designs and
standards. Nothing personal, OK?”

“No worries and no offense taken.”

“It's not about you,” Lucia said. “It's about
her and how high up in the air her nose points. Am I right?”

“I guess.”

“I don't know, Andre. Women do interesting
things. Maybe she would go for you, the silent, strong, smart,
educated
and
artistic kind, with a little bit of dangerous
thrown in. But I'm not getting that vibe. Something isn't adding up
for me.”

“You get all that from watching her on
TV.”

“Yeah, I do. That vibe tells me she's looking
to squeeze you for something other than nighttime pleasures. You
know what I mean?”

“You mean, related to the shooting. You think
she wants to keep riding the story.”

“Yeah. That.” Lucia paused as if something
told her to proceed with care. “And something else. I can't know
what that is, but something's there. I can feel it. The more you
get to know me you'll see. I have good instincts for stuff like
this.”

A strong urge came over me to confirm her
suspicion, but I restrained it. The next moment I considered
whether to probe her about this instinct that had so uncannily
given her that
vibe
she talked about. That too I set
aside.

“I appreciate your concern,” I said.

“Ah. Now comes the pat on the head. Good
girl, Lucia. Now run along.”

“That's not what I meant.”

She lowered her head again to give me another
of her through-the-hair looks. “My bad,” she said. “I'm not used to
guys heeding my advice. Not the straight ones, anyway.”

I pulled up a stool and sat at the island
counter. “So what would you do in my place?”

Lucia laughed. “I'd sleep with her, and then
I'd give her the boot.”

Now I laughed. “You sound like a lot of guys
I know.”

She smiled for a few seconds then grew
serious. “I'm making a real point here, though,” she said pointing
at me. “That chick's trouble. Don't get too tangled up with her,
OK?”

She let the question linger and drift in the
space between us before she punctuated it with, “Don’t get
entangled.
”

“She's not my brand. Is that it?” I fought to
seem nonchalant.

“Something like that. Listen, Andre. We
haven't known each other for long, but I can read you well enough.
You're a troubled soul. That's alright. Most artists are,
especially the good ones. You just have to channel that trouble.
You point it like a laser, OK? You must focus it into your art, and
nothing else. Whatever's going on here, with you, with her and
whatever else, don't let it pull you away from your art.”

We stared at each other for few moments that
felt like an hour.

“Am I getting through here? Am I making
sense?” she asked.

I had to look away, through the kitchen
window and out into the night. Yeah, she'd gotten through, mostly
because she'd said something I knew all along.

Back at my apartment, Bridget more or less
ran to her laptop the second I unlocked the front door. She didn't
say why, and I didn't ask. This time, though, I did go to her and
stood over her shoulder. She didn't seem to mind.

She brought up a command window and typed a
few commands. It took me a minute to decipher what she was doing. I
stopped breathing when I did. She was running a utility to see
whether anyone had accessed her computer while we were gone.
Another minute passed, and she pointed at the screen and the
warning message flagging that a keyboard monitoring app had been
installed. She typed another command, followed by another, followed
by a third, which in turn executed a batched set of commands.

When that concluded, a message appeared
confirming the offending app had gone into quarantine. She ran a
quick diagnostic and flashed me a thumbs-up when it came up with a
all-clear indication.

Still staring at the screen, Bridget
grinned.

She switched windows to bring up a browser.
Within it, she reviewed the Twitter stream for her news network.
She stopped at two identical entries about a train derailment. With
her index finger, she wagged back and forward between the two
items, then nodded. It took me a few seconds to notice what she
saw. A one character difference, X instead of H, in the hyperlink
each of the Twitter messages listed.

Bridget looked up at me with a grin. “See
that?”

“Yeah, interesting story.” I said that as my
mind guessed at what that one character difference meant. An
encoded something, from the way she reacted. Confirmation of
whatever she was expecting to learn, maybe about meeting with her
source?

She went back to the command screen and
unleashed a flurry of keystrokes, the grand total of which read, “I
feel like one of Goldilocks' bears. Question is, which one should I
be?”

I read it in silence. Once I nodded, she
back-spaced to erase her one-on-one text message.

She then reached into her purse and took out
a device I recognized. It took all manner of self-restrain not to
ask her where she'd gotten it.

Bridget turned it on and frowned at it until
a green light came on. She then began to walk around my apartment.
The device's green light turned red once by my TV, and twice in my
small kitchen, by the microwave and across the way by the stove. It
lit up three times in my bedroom and twice in the other bedroom I
used for my office. We went into the bathroom last, where there
wasn't much room for concealment. The device lit up once when
Bridget brought it to the toilet.

She reached behind the tank, felt for it, and
pulled it out: a small putty-looking black thing with a translucent
hair-like antenna hanging from it. With a grin, she held it out to
me in the palm of her hand.

I wanted to tell her we shouldn't destroy it.
To do so would alert whomever had installed it that we were onto
them, and that we were taking evasive measures, something that
might drive them to make a move on us.

“We really must talk about your
house-keeping,” Bridget said. “The rest of the house is clean
enough, but this bathroom needs some serious disinfecting.”

I started waving my hands to dissuade her,
but she was already lifting the toilet lid. The bug dropped into
the water with a blop. She pulled the flush lever.

“Close the door,” she whispered.

I did, and she turned on the faucet. She
waved her scanner around the bathroom one more time.

She turned to me and came closer. “Relax,
Andre. They'll just think paranoid Bridget went on a bug hunt and
missed them all but one. We need a safe room, and this will be it.
Heck, if a girl can't tinkle with some privacy, what has the world
come to?”

I looked into her eyes and saw them clouding
with concern.

“It's OK, really,” she said.

“Where did you get that thing?”

“I'm sure you can guess.”

She set the scanner on the sink counter and
turned it off. With a wry smile, she turned to me.

“You seem tense,” she said, resting her arms
loosely on my shoulders.

“You should be too.”

“Oh, I am. All wound up, with jet lag
sprinkled on top. Long day of bouncing around town with an artist,
and all.” She gave me a light kiss. “You need to relax.”

“We're wasting water.”

“Oh? What happened to that white noise trick
you taught me? A faucet may not be as good as a fountain, but it
does well enough, wouldn't you say?”

My mind raced to put her part of the puzzle
together. Her source had given her the scanner, had somehow spoofed
her network's Twitter feed to post a warning, or a go ahead
message, or something. If that were not enough, Bridget had the
know-how and trade-craft to detect and evade electronic
surveillance, presumably, also thanks to her source. Why then had
she sought to recruit me out in the open, in a New York restaurant?
Why had she done all this in full view? Because she wanted my
handlers to come after me, after her, to over-play their hand and
in so doing reveal the secrets she was trying to expose? Had her
source counseled her to do it this way?

“This is a dangerous game you're playing,” I
said.

“You mean the game
we're
playing,
right? Because you're in this all the way, fully
engaged
.”

That last word made me want to pull away from
her. I recalled Walter asking me whether I was
engaged
, and
could not help but make the connection, especially given the way
she'd said it and the way she was looking at me now.

“Why do you say it like that,
engaged
?” I asked.

“I guess my source is better than you
thought.”

“Jesus, Bridget. Do you know what we're
into?”

“I think I do. Do you?”

“What are you?” I asked.

“Still a reporter. Just a reporter doing my
job.”

I shook my head and tried to step away from
her. She didn't let me, and somehow we ended up closer than before,
with my hands resting on her hips.

Bridget smiled. “God, you really do need to
relax.”

Her forearms locked behind my neck and she
pulled me in. She looked into my eyes not with malice or lust, but
with what I could not mistake for anything but compassion. Then she
kissed me long and hard.

Entangled.
That word formed my first
thought as I awoke, sheets strapped through and around my legs,
Bridget’s right arm and leg pinning me down onto my bed. Bright
sunlight beamed through window blinds whose blades wouldn’t close
all the way. The early, almost horizontal angle of the sun’s rays
beckoned me to get up. My full, aching bladder did as well, pressed
downward under the weight of Bridget’s thigh. I stayed there,
asking myself and whoever else might be listening how’d gotten to
this point.
Entangled.

I stirred gently in hopes Bridget would
either roll onto her back or wake up. In return, I only got a soft
moan and a shift in her weight that tightened her hold on me. I was
about to take more assertive action when her cellphone rang with a
repeating pattern of what I recognized as a Bach sonata for
harpsichord.

She turned to tend to it. I rolled out to
escape for the bathroom.

When I returned I found her under the thin
sheet, no longer a tangled mess, swiping on her phone. She stopped
with a frown.

“Something interesting?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Care to share?”

She looked up with a smile. “Sure. How much
is it worth to you?”

“I’m not that kind of a morning person.”

“Bummer.”

“Well?” I pressed.

“New developments in that story I’m here to
cover.” She looked down at her phone, then back at me with a raised
eyebrow. “More details to come.” She got up, releasing her
one-handed grip on the sheet and walked past me.

From the bathroom she said, “You guys still
having a drought here?”

“Always,” I replied.

“Then how about we take a shower together,”
she shot back with a playful voice. “I wouldn’t want to bust your
water bill.”

By the time I entered the bathroom, she'd
already stepped into the shower. She turned on the water, then
waved for me to come closer.

I closed the door behind me, waved her off,
and sat on the toilet, next to the tub-shower. She knelt down
inside the tub and rested her arms on her knees. With the curtain
open, water spray flying off her back and steam going everywhere,
she stared at me.

“You're shivering,” she said.

Only now did I notice it, the trembling that
rises from a tremor deep inside your stomach, the kind that grips
you when you feel the world strangling you.

“Why don't you come in?” she said. “The water
will warm you--”

“I can't do this,” I said.

“Can't do what?”

“Whatever you and your source are scheming,
if that's what's really going on here.”

Bridget shifted her weight to sit and wrap
her arms around her calves. “What's really going on here,” she
said. “You still think I might be working for someone.”

“You are. You're working for her, whoever she
is.”

“You think she's manipulating me, pulling my
strings.” Bridget looked up to draw in one long breath, then looked
back at me. “We think alike. I can't assure you she isn't driving
the show. In a way she is. But you and I, we're smart people. We
know how far to go.”