Bloodshot (15 page)

I wanted to muster some righteous indignation, but I was too hyped up on my own fear to manage it. I’m not often driven to tears by such things, but as I stood there, hunting desperately for something to gather—or maybe just dithering in my confusion—I almost wanted to cry.

But after a minute or two of hand-fluttering, I pulled myself together and grabbed a duffel out of the closet. I crammed it full of my most worn clothes and a pair of beloved boots that Fluevog doesn’t make anymore, and I left everything else. I went out the way I came in, for whatever silly reason I couldn’t tell you. But back out in the night, on the roof, beside the mildly irritated pigeons and the occasional rat that ran along the power lines, I jumped back down to the ground and walked the rest of the way back to my car.

I didn’t have a parking ticket.

I didn’t really expect one.

I threw the duffel bag and my purse onto the passenger seat, leaned my forehead against the steering wheel, and forced myself to think.

What now? Where should I go? What should I do?

I’d sent Ian and Cal off to Ballard, and I’d left the kids as secure as I could leave them, so I was faced with a handful of options—none of which seemed strictly ideal. I could officially and completely leave the city, pretending that I’d never heard of any of them and that I didn’t owe any of them anything. But while I was prepared to insist that I owed my feral squatters nothing, I was harder-pressed to conclude that I didn’t owe Ian the time of day.

True, he was the one who’d gotten me into this mess, but he
did
warn me. And I didn’t believe (then, or now) that he’d deliberately
put me on a federal watch list and sent the men in black after me. At this point, I was already eyeballs-deep in his problem anyway. There was an excellent chance that if I couldn’t solve Ian’s problems, I might never untangle myself from Official Interest. And God help me if whoever was after me put two and two together, realizing that the woman in the condo was in fact the thief known as Cheshire Red to all those international agencies.

But I was getting ahead of myself. I was doing it again, assuming the worst and doing my best to plot against it, even though the worst-case scenario is often either incorrect or vastly under-calculated.

None of this changed anything. I was mired in Ian’s situation whether I liked it or not, and if I’d had the option of declining his case before, that option had gone out the window when I’d taken that PDF from the Bad Hatter. Logic dictated that I needed to see this through, and sort it out at the source if I ever hoped to resume my wholly understated existence.

Merely coming to this decision bolstered me a bit, and made the world look a little less overwhelming. I could do it! All I needed to do was track down the missing paperwork, hand it over to Ian, perhaps flee the country with him and Cal (hey, why not?), and start over Elsewhere, as I’ve done a dozen times before.

Plan: Achieved.

I reached for my car keys and slipped the right one into the ignition. The moment before I turned it, a sleek black car with government plates went sliding around the corner with all the perfect quietness and glide of a UFO. If that thing had an engine in it, I couldn’t hear it—but there’s always the possibility that I’d become totally unhinged with fear.

I backpedaled for a second, trying to rationalize and justify a means whereby that car was absolutely
not
cruising my neighborhood because its driver knew where I lived, but within moments
that car was joined by a second vehicle, rolling smoothly down the perpendicular road and vanishing around the side of an Indian restaurant that had been closed for hours. The sneaky black sedans moved with preternatural slickness, like they were touring the town on frictionless tires.

I sank down low in the driver’s seat until, it was to be fervently prayed, anyone driving past couldn’t see me. Carefully but quickly, I fired my hand up to the rearview mirror—tilting it so that I could see the street outside without revealing my oh-so-clever hiding place … in the front seat of my car.

The first car oozed past and turned down the street I’d walked along mere minutes earlier; the second car was out of sight. Both of them had government plates, which I noted with a god-awful sinking feeling. I didn’t see anything else and I didn’t hear anything else, but once I couldn’t see either one of them anymore, I took a chance and started the Thunderbird. It came to life almost cheerfully, and far too loudly for my comfort—but at least it started. I’d been half afraid that the engine would pull a horror-movie cliché on me and refuse to turn over.

I eased the car forward toward the stop sign and pretended to mind my own business all the way into the main drag, where I took excellent care to obey every damn traffic law I could think of, to such maniacal excess that it no doubt looked far more suspicious than if I’d just gunned the car and shot down the hill.

Nobody stopped me. No flashing red lights or crow-black cars with tinted windows came stalking up to my bumper. And eventually I was away. I was out of my neighborhood and instinctively heading toward the interstate again, but I stopped myself downtown, pulling into an all-night parking garage to regroup and make some more distinct plans than “solve Ian’s problem and bill him an arm and a leg.”

I parked in a back corner of the bottom floor, in a half-empty row of other vehicles that had been abandoned over the evening by third-shift workers or drunks. I pulled Ian’s file out of my bag and examined it again, hunting for direction or inspiration under the lemon-yellow and sickly orange security lights of the garage.

Cal’s atrocious handwriting stood out from the margins of the first thing I grabbed.

“Holtzer Point, St. Paul.”

But whatever Holtzer Point had once held, it was long gone—stolen by Mr. 887-something-or-another, and relocated to parts unknown.

I reached up to click on the car’s dome light so I could read a little better, then turned it off again when I realized it made me more visible. Such indecision. I was plagued with it.

This guy. Mr. 887 … forget it. In my head I nicknamed him The Other Thief.

Whoever he was, I needed him.

And I had no idea where to find him, but it didn’t sound like Uncle Sam knew, either. This was a problem. I couldn’t just poke my way into government files and turn up his name and address.

However …

I tapped my knuckles against the steering wheel. I always fidget when I’m thinking. Can’t help it.

However, Uncle Sam knew The Other Thief’s identity. The serial number told me that much, and I wondered if there was some good way to take that number and turn it into a name. It’d be nice to know who I was looking for.

If I could pin down his identity, I could pin down other things. Family members, friends. Former service buddies. Co-workers.

I might even be able to get my hands on his old phone records or credit card statements; it’s amazing what you can find with
the right phone calls and law enforcement clearance … not that I have law enforcement clearance. I don’t. But my fellow freelancer the Red Queen does, or if she doesn’t, she knows how to fake it.

Bad Hatter’s info might have burned me, but I believed him when he said it wasn’t deliberate. And even if Red Queen knew about my personal meltdown over here, it likely wouldn’t mean anything to her. She owes me one. About three years ago she needed architectural schematics for a large, unmarked building belonging to some Italian cardinal … but located in St. Petersburg, Florida. I got them for her. And no, I never asked what she needed them for.

At any rate, my number one priority was to track down The Other Thief’s name and then backtrack him clear to the cradle. The more I could learn about him, the better my chances of predicting where he’d run and hide. The fact is, very few people actually disappear with the kind of thoroughness required to stay disappeared. The odds were strong that someone, somewhere, knew where he’d gone.

But first things first. How to pry his personal information away from the government? I glared back down at Ian’s folder and I wondered: Could I find it at Holtzer Point?

Maybe. After all, one unauthorized downloading of the Bloodshot PDF had been serious enough to warrant a platoon of Men in Black. Surely the government hadn’t just let hard copies detailing the nitty-gritty details vanish—not without looking into it? There would’ve been an investigation. There would’ve been sensitive paperwork. And where did sensitive paperwork of this stripe wind up?

Holtzer Point.

But if the military or the feds were looking for me, did I really want to run straight into one of their most private facilities? For the moment, I’d given them the slip. A very narrow, very uncertain
slip—but my fragile liberty was liberty nonetheless, and they hadn’t caught me yet.

At best, it wasn’t exactly a cunning strategy to impress the ages and achieve the status of tactical legend, but it was better than nothing. And otherwise, all I had was nothing apart from “run that guy’s serial number through the Internet and hope to strike gold.”

I had every intention of doing that, by the way. I’m not an idiot.

But since I’m not an idiot—and knowing what had happened when Duncan had nabbed that PDF—I decided to do it on the way out of town.

And I definitely needed to get out of town. I wanted to put as much distance between me and Seattle as possible, in order to regroup and see if I couldn’t brainstorm my way to some better idea once I achieved some breathing room and could calm the fuck back down.

With luck, I might even cough up some less stupid plan.

I squeezed the brittle old papers and made my resolution. Then I stuffed them back into the envelope, took a deep breath, and started my car again.

I’d never been to Minnesota before. But there’s a first time for everything.

So I’d begin my withdrawal and regrouping at St. Paul, but I wouldn’t leave from SeaTac—the Seattle-Tacoma airport. It was probably crawling with leftover feds from the Mean Bean, if my ruse had worked. The only way to find out was to try and fly out, and I couldn’t see taking that kind of risk. It wasn’t like me, and it wasn’t healthy, and I wasn’t in the mood for one of those plans where you let yourself get captured in order to escape with information.

No, the Thunderbird’s tank was full and I was feeling like a road trip instead.

About three hours to the south, Portland, Oregon, has an airport,
too—and by sunrise I was nervously ensconced in a Marriott hotel immediately outside it. I closed all the curtains, plugged all the cracks, and turned off all the cell phones. I rigged the door with a cheap alarm that would give me time to … I don’t know, panic and cry, if anyone tried to bust in.

And shortly after sundown the next day, I had a plane ticket that would bring me to the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport. I also had the entire contents of my Thunderbird packed into the suitcase from the trunk, which I checked in order to keep my very sharp little tools and whatnot. I left the car in long-term parking. Maybe I’d be back for it, maybe I wouldn’t. For all I knew, it might sit there for weeks before anyone thought to tow it. There was always the chance this would blow over and I could just go back home, picking up where I’d left off.

Optimism! Okay, forced optimism. But it was all I had.

I checked the Internet to see if The Other Thief’s serial number turned up anything via Google magic, but no. Nothing.

And then I ran, not even sticking around to see if anyone was going to chase me down for running that search. Call me a coward if you like, but it didn’t really matter if they were following me or not.

I was headed to the airport.

I don’t typically enjoy flying. There are too many variables, and I’m on a narrow kind of time frame—I simply
must
be indoors in the dark when the sun rises, unless I want to wind up a steaming, wibbling pulp—so the red-eye is fine by me. But any delays or reroutes can be downright deadly.

I made my connection in Denver and skidded into Minnesota with an hour or two to spare before morning.

I won’t bore you with the particulars of what came next, except to say that I found another hotel (a Hyatt, this time), burrowed in for the day, and then went looking for some slightly more solid accommodations
downtown. I wasn’t 100 percent certain of where Holtzer Point was located, and I’d need some time to lie low and do some research. This sort of research is hard to accomplish when you’re stuck in an airport hotel, and much easier (and less eyebrow-raising) to manage when you’re in a very posh establishment nearer to the center of everything.

Eventually I paid up for a full week at a four-star establishment on the other side of the river, hunkered down, and spent a couple of days scavenging for paperwork, rumors, and hints. It was mostly boring—which is to say, I didn’t learn anything new or exciting about Ian’s incarceration and nobody kicked down my door. But I did eventually locate the storage facility and learn a bit about its security protocols.

At a glance they were pretty pathetic, but that might be meaningless. Even the shittiest schematics can be made troublesome by enough manpower on guard duty.

I inferred from the diagrams that Uncle Sam simply didn’t believe there was any good reason that anyone, anywhere, would want inside … even if anyone could find it. (Conspiracy nuts on the Internet be damned.) And yet a token effort at security was undertaken as a matter of general principle.

It reminded me of a story I’d stumbled across years ago about a bank vault full of Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea dollars that nobody wanted. Thousands and thousands of dollars, just sitting there—and the bank couldn’t give them away, not for trying. But out of a sense of duty or whatever, they kept the coins locked up in the basement behind a barred cage frame.

At the time, I wondered why anyone would bother.

But as I sat in my very posh hotel, wearing a fluffy white robe with the hotel logo on the right breast, staring down at a bedspread sprinkled with marginally informative files stamped
CONFIDENTIAL
, I concluded that guarding Holtzer Point was even sillier. The
only people who wanted to get inside it were sitting at home eating Cheetos from their beanbags, filing Freedom of Information Act petitions and coding way-too-much Flash into their alarmist webpages. They were armchair wingnuts. They weren’t nosy vampires with a skill set like mine, and nothing better to do than go check the place out.