Black Swan (24 page)

    "We hear the weather's going to get nasty," said Hammon. "What does that really mean?"

    "Who knows. Happens this time of year. Nothing's perfect. Don't let it scare you. The Swan made it through '38 and everything after that. Built like a tank. There might be some thunder and lightning and a little wind. You guys worried about that?" I asked, looking from face to face.

    "Oui," said Pierre. "Shaking in our undershorts."

    They laughed at this, so I laughed with them

    I got the general sense that the conversation they wanted to have would be difficult with me sitting there. So I decided to hang around for a while. I brought us all fresh coffee, commented on the fall in barometric pressure, which I could feel, but doubted any of them could, surveyed the group on loyalty to the New York Yankees, asked if anyone knew how to balance a stock portfolio, and otherwise kept them happily engaged until Jock, the silent one, said, "Listen, pal, love to talk all night, but we have some private things to discuss."

    "I didn't know we were pals," I said. "So what're we talking about?"

    "I said it was private."

    "About finding Axel Fey? Your plan of attack? I thought we were working on this together. One for all and all that."

    "If I thought you could help I wouldn't have invited Jock and Pierre," said Hammon, agreeably.

    "Pretty impressive people."

    Nobody wanted to comment on that, so it lay where it fell.

    "Okay," I said, getting up to leave. "Suit yourself."

    "Oh, Sam," said Hammon before I had a chance to move away. "I seriously recommend that you let us handle everything going forward. It would be better for everybody."

    "I bet it would," I said, heading back over to the bar.

    Anika was wearing a sleeveless white shirt over a short denim skirt. I noticed for the first time a tattoo on her left shoulder. It was the number twenty-five in a deep burgundy.

"I didn't know tats came in that color," I said.

    "Got it for my twenty-fifth birthday. Special order. Though now it's more like eighty-six. They warn you about how the stupid things evolve."

    "I think the stupid part is getting one in the first place," I said.

    "That's the kind of thing a father would say."

    "Not surprising. I am one."

    "No daughters, I hope."

    "One daughter. My only kid. About your age, and even more aggravating. So who're the new boys in town?" I asked, jerking my head in that direction.

    She took a pull from a bottle of water on the bar, then wiped her hands on her denim skirt. Then she left the bar area, waving me to follow, which I did through the lobby, around the reception desk and into a small office. It had the sour, faded feel of a room still to be updated and restored. The only evidence of the Feys was a small white board screwed into one wall covered with a checklist, most of the items unchecked, and a computer on a side table against the other wall. The screensaver was a crude animation of Albert Einstein and Socrates playing chess.

    She shut the door behind us.

    "Did I tell you that Derrick Hammon is a crypto-fascist, sociopathic fucking sick creep survivalist nut bag? Adventure man—climbing mountains, deep diving wrecks, high altitude parachuting. His ideal vacation is stripping down to his boxers, painting his body and living in the woods for a week, killing little bunnies and shit with his bare hands and eating them raw. Don't believe me? It's worse than that. His best friends are ex-Special Forces, the kind who go freelance after discharge. Nowadays we call them private contractors, like they're the same people who lay tile in your bathroom. He pays them to train him in counterinsurgency tactics, which really comes in handy in suburban Boston. What do

you think 't Hooft is, a database manager? Jesus Christ, for a so-called sophisticated person, you don't know shit."

    She said all this in a forced whisper, only a few inches from my ear. As she spoke, I could feel an atomized mist of saliva spray against my cheek. Her breath smelled of toothpaste and wine. When I turned to look at her, her face was slightly flushed, her eyes narrow, but glistening with stress and intelligence. Her broad mouth made more so by her lips, redder and more swollen than I'd remembered them.

    "No, you didn't tell me. Would've been good to know. So he's brought his A-team here to track down Axel. And you don't want them to," I said.

    "Duh."

    "So why do you let them stay here? Where's your father in all this?"

    She drew in a deep breath, held it, then let it out noisily. With all the intimate whispering, she'd moved close enough for me to feel the outside curves of her clothed body. I held my ground.

    "There's a pretty serious cop on the island now," I said. "I doubt he'll want paramilitary ops taking over his jurisdiction."

    "People can get themselves into really, really difficult situations, even when they think all they're doing is living their lives," said Anika, in the same full-throated whisper. "Especially when you're a wing nut family with far more curiosity than common sense. It just happens, one stupid step at a time, and before you know it, it's like an ultra cosmic nightmare to the nth power. Do you have any idea how powerful technology is becoming, and how few people actually know how to turn the knobs and pull the levers? We've got a society of teenagers out cruising in daddy's Maserati."

    "Okay, so what does that have to do with our situation?"

    She shook her head violently enough to toss her hair into her face.

    "No cops."

    All my cop friends were devoted to Occam's Razor—that the explanation for any phenomenon was nearly always the most obvious. And its variant: if you think something's true, it probably is.

    "What did he do?" I asked.

    "Who?"

    "Your father. What do they have on him? What drove him out of the company? What's causing him to sit by passively while Hammon and his goons invade your family's home? He doesn't strike me as the kind of character who'd just roll over for nothing. What did he do?" I repeated.

    She pulled the chair out from under the computer station and sat down. She put her hands together and gripped them between her bare knees, as if to clench her secrets more tightly to her body.

    "I'm going to pretend you didn't ask that," she said.

    "You better answer if you want my help. You don't know how close I am to ditching you and this whole sorry mess. If you're as good a researcher as you say you are, you'll know I've been through some cosmic nightmares of my own in recent years. I don't need to play around in someone else's. It's one thing to go out on a limb for people you didn't know a week ago, it's another to be lied to, jerked around and kept in the dark. You're not the first person to think manipulation was a good strategy with me. It isn't."

    With her hands still held between her knees, she bowed her head, with only her nose showing between falling waves of hair.

    "It's not why I wanted to sleep with you," she said, softly.

    "And it's not why I didn't. What do they have on your father?"

    She shook her head.

    "They have something on him," she said. "I can't tell you what it is. It's not my place. If that's a deal-breaker, then just go."

    The door to the office opened and a man walked in. He peered at me, then at his daughter, who looked up at him and smiled a weak smile.

    "Hi, Dad."

S
orry," said Fey. "I didn't know you were in here. Is something wrong?"

    "Besides the obvious?" said Anika.

    He squeezed his lips together and stood silently, a vivid testament to my charge and Anika's partial admission. I wanted to put it to Fey right there, but that would have meant exposing Anika, the consequences of which I had no way of knowing. I didn't have to care, but something stopped me. Maybe she was a better manipulator than I gave her credit for.

    "We were just talking about finding Axel," I said. "You haven't heard anything, I take it."

    He shook his head.

    "Nothing. Are you leaving us?" he asked, nodding at my backpack, which I'd slipped off my back and dropped on the floor.

    "Yeah," I said. "I gotta get back. Looks like you got plenty of support here."

    "Indeed," he said. "The forces are assembled."

    I picked up the backpack and put it on my back.

    "Thanks again for letting us lay over. With all you got going on, it was a good deed."

    "You may thank my daughter," he said. "Good deeds are more her specialty."

    I did thank her and left, glancing into the bar as I went through the lobby. The gang was still in there, huddled around a round table. I walked out into the bright autumn day, went out to the street and looked both ways.

    One of the things I learned from twenty years of troubleshooting large, complex hydrocarbon processing systems was that in the absence of any logical, coherent, reasonably promising angle of attack, action was better than contemplation.

    I turned right, toward the ferry dock. I passed the yacht club and stopped in at the gas station. Track was at his post behind the grimy desk. He wasn't happy to see me, but I made him happier when I told him I was leaving.

    "It's sort of painful to leave after everyone's been so kind and welcoming," I said.

    "Then you'll have to hurry on back," he said. "We'll be waiting with the same greeting."

    "I had a nice chat with Desi," I said. "Turns out we have a lot of friends in common. Maybe I'll stay with him."

    He didn't look like he believed me, though a breath of doubt drifted across his face. I left him with that and headed up the road. In about twenty minutes I was at the general store. I stopped in and asked for directions to the ferry dock. The clerk and the lone shopper were all too happy to oblige, briefly contesting the best route, with the shopper sketching her preference on a napkin. I thanked them both and left.

    Not long after, I reached the ferry dock. The red-haired woman behind the ticket counter was at the ready.

    "When's the next ferry?" I asked.

    "Gettin' out of Dodge?"

    "I hear there's another storm coming."

    "That is correct. A real hurricane this time," she said. "Headin' up the coast, and kissing Long Island on the way by. They're talking up to sixty knots steady. That's gale force at least."

    "When?"

    "Day after tomorrow. You've got plenty of time. Unless you want to take the two," she turned around and looked at the big clock behind her, "which is in about a half-hour."

    "Give me a walk-on," I said. "I've got to look after my boat. She's anchored in New London."

    I bought the ticket and went back outside. I walked around the back of the ferry office, then cut through a parking lot of an adjacent building and took a narrow street, nearly an alley, out to the road that curved around the southern coast and headed back east. I took out Gwyneth's map and followed it to an old naval outpost on the southeast corner of the island. I went down the battered driveway, around an abandoned brick building, pulled off my backpack and sat on a rock facing out to sea. I took out my cell phone and called Randall Dodge.

    He answered the phone by saying, "Your theory's holding up."

    "How close can you get?"

    "A section of road in the hoity-toity part of town. Humboldt's Crossing, between Meadowland and Page."

    I studied the map.

    "I see it. Near the middle of the country club, close to the airport. Any chance of getting the exact house?"

    "Not without directly hacking the service provider," he said. "They could easily catch my ass."

    "I thought Indian hackers moved through cyberspace like ghosts on the wind."

    "It's been a while. I'm a little rusty on security protocols."

    "I truly appreciate what you've done."

    "Happy to do it, Sam. You can tell Attorney Swaitkowski that you've cashed in the last of the favors I owe her."

    "Not a problem. I finally got her a paying gig."

    I hung up with Randall, and feeling like my luck with Native Americans was running strong, called Two Trees. When he answered, I told him where I was and asked if he could possibly come pick me up. When he said he could, I asked him to keep it to himself, that I'd explain when he got there.

    "You're trying to get somewhere undetected," he said.

    "Like a ghost on the wind."

    While I waited, I saw the ferry enter the mouth of the channel. There was no way to know if the lady in the ticket office would look to see if I got on, but the odds were she wouldn't. She had no reason to, and with no one else there to man the counter, had little wherewithal.

    I heard the sound of a car heading down the drive, so I got up and went around to meet Two Trees. He leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door for me. I sat down with my backpack in my lap.

    "Where you headed, Cap'?" he asked. I pointed to a spot on the map. He nodded. "I know what you got in mind."