Chaos Theory (16 page)

 

T
hey had to wait for over an hour, sitting on the low stone wall under the bougainvillea, while two police officers took a statement from each of them. One police officer was short and Hispanic, with black furry forearms, his face beaded all over with perspiration. The other was tall and gingery with a large nose and close-set eyes. To Noah, they looked more like movie extras than real police officers. The officer with the close-set eyes kept asking the same questions over and over, in a flat, expressionless drawl, and writing the answers down with childish slowness, with the tip of his tongue clenched between his teeth.

‘Before the fire started, did you hear an explosion of any nature?’

‘An explosion, yes. Like,
boofff
.’

‘
Boofff
?’

‘Well, it could have been softer, you know. More like
woofff
.’

‘Which was it, then?
Boofff
or
woofff
?’

‘
Woofff
, I’d say. But not quite as drawn-out as that. More like
whoof!
’

The Hispanic officer wiped his forehead with the fur on his arm. ‘You didn’t notice any individuals acting at all suspicious around here, any time before the fire started?’

Noah shook his head. ‘I was out on the terrace. You can’t see the front of the house from the terrace.’

‘Only reason I ask, sir, is that there’s a grey sedan illegally parked up the road a ways, with no license plates and so far as I can see, no VIN number.’

‘Haven’t seen a soul,’ said Noah.

‘Nobody come to your door or nothing, asking to call the auto club?’

‘Nope. Nobody.’

Noah had never liked lying. His father always used to slap him on the back of the head if he caught him out in a lie, hard. Apart from that, this whole situation was getting way too dangerous. Jenna had died, Mo had died, Trina had died, and now he and Silja and Leon had come close to being killed. Maybe it was time to tell the police about the medallions and the men in grey suits.

‘There’s one thing—’ he began.

‘What’s that?’ asked the gingery police officer, but Silja narrowed her eyes at Noah, and gave him the briefest shake of her head.

‘No, nothing,’ said Noah. ‘Forget it.’

Once the police officers had moved out of earshot, Silja came and stood close beside him. Without looking at him, she said, ‘Adeola warned us not to trust anybody at all, remember? Even the police.’

‘I know. But we could have had our throats cut, for Christ’s sake. And look at my goddamned house. I mean, look at my goddamned
house
.’

‘It’s terrible. I’m so sorry. But the safest thing for now is to act like we know nothing, and saw nothing.’

‘Screw you,’ said Marilyn, and then imitated the warbling of Noah’s cellphone.

In fact, his cellphone
was
warbling. He answered it, and it was Rick.

‘Noah? Can you meet us at the Bel Air? I think we might be making some progress.’

‘OK . . . but you’ll have to give us twenty minutes or so. We’ve had a slight problem.’

‘What’s the matter? You sound upset.’

‘Oh, I’m upset. We were paid a visit by a couple of unwelcome friends this morning. Friends in grey suits.’

‘Same people? What happened?’

‘Can’t tell you now, cops are still here. But mayhem isn’t the word for it.’

‘You’re all safe, though?’

‘Shaken, for sure, but not stirred.’

‘OK, come down as soon as you can. A guy called Ted Armstrong will meet you when you get to the entrance. Tell him that you want to speak to Mr and Mrs Trebuchet.’

Noah went over to the police officers and asked them if he and Silja could leave. The gingery one said, ‘We’re going to need a location, sir, where you’ll be staying for the rest of the day.’

‘With friends. Guy called Mo Speller, 548 Lincoln Boulevard, Santa Monica.’

‘OK, sir. We’ll probably need to talk to you again.’

‘Not sure if I can tell you any more than I’ve told you already. I was taking a shower and the whole goddamn house went up, that’s all. If you ask me, it was a natural gas leak. Can’t think what else.’

‘Sir – you’d be surprised what people know without them knowing that they know it.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Witnesses, that’s what I’m talking about, sir. They see things happen, but at first they don’t understand the significance of what they’re looking at. A little while later, though, when they’ve had time to think it over, it all fits together. Like,
bing
! a light bulb switches on, right over their heads.’

‘Bing?’ said Noah.

‘That’s right,
bing
! We call it “delayed interpretation”.’

There was a slow, interrogative quality in the officer’s tone of voice that made Noah feel uncomfortable, as if the officer suspected that he hadn’t been telling him the whole truth. He’d said ‘delayed inter-pre-
tation
’ as if it were a question. There was something in the way that the officer was staring at him, too, with those close-set eyes.

Come on, Noah, he told himself, you’re being paranoid. He lifted his hand and said, ‘So long, then, fellas.’ He was trying to look nonchalant, but he was acutely conscious of how stiffly he was acting it.

 

Adeola said, ‘My God, they do mean business, don’t they? Your
house
! You were so lucky you managed to escape.’

‘I don’t think luck had much to do with it,’ said Noah. ‘It was Silja. Never saw anything like that. One swing round that flagstaff and wham! The guy was knocked flat.’

Adeola reached her hand out and took hold of Silja’s hand. Two tall women, one the colour of burnished bronze, the other as white as milk. ‘You must teach
me
how to swing round flagstaffs. Think how much I could impress the diplomats at those UN conferences in New York.’

They were sitting in one of the newly-refurbished Spanish cottages in the grounds of the Bel Air Hotel. The walls and ceiling were panelled in pale yellow and the furniture was gilded and ornate. A huge spray of fresh flowers stood in the centre of the coffee table, filling the room with the fragrance of sweet peas and roses.

The back door to the garden was open, but a solid-looking man with cropped white hair was sitting in an armchair, keeping an eye on it, while an even more solid-looking man with a bald head was sitting by the front door, reading the sports pages.

‘I heard from Bill Pringle around eleven thirty this morning,’ said Rick. ‘He had breakfast at The Watergate with his old friend from the Secret Service Archive. His friend is almost one hundred per cent sure that there’s another medallion in the archive, exactly the same as the others.’

‘Did he tell you who it used to belong to?’

‘No. But he said that his friend was going to go round to the archive later this afternoon, to check on the medallion and make sure that it
is
identical. Then he’ll call me again.’

‘OK,’ said Noah. ‘So what do we do in the meantime?’

‘There’s very little we
can
do,’ said Adeola. ‘I intend to ring around some of my Middle Eastern contacts, to see if I can find out any more about those two attempts on my life. It’s possible that one of them has heard something on the diplomatic grapevine. Leon – you might use my computer to do some more research into what the medallions might actually mean.’

‘Sure,’ said Leon. ‘And I’ll see if there’s any more dope on Professor Halflight, too. I mean – if he turns out to be some secret terrorist mastermind – how cool would that be?’

‘Question is,’ Noah put in, ‘what happens if we find out who these people are? If we can’t even trust the cops, who’s going to help us?’

‘What does an animal do, when it is cornered?’ asked Adeola.

‘It takes a dump?’

‘It turns around, and it attacks its attackers. And that is exactly what
we
are going to do. We have no choice. We have to find out who these people really are. We have to hunt them down before they hunt
us
down.’

‘And then what?’ asked Noah.

‘I don’t know. It depends who they turn out to be, how influential they are. It depends if they have friends in high places. If necessary, we will have to kill them.’

Noah looked at Silja uneasily. Adeola caught his look and said, ‘Noah – you have seen what they are capable of doing. Obviously they have no compunction whatsoever about killing
us
. For them, human lives have no value, not even their own. We may be faced with no alternative.’

‘So we’re forming ourselves into a hit squad?’ said Noah. He turned from Silja to Leon to Rick to Adeola. ‘Some fricking hit squad! Look at us!’

The solid-looking man sitting by the garden door turned to Rick and said, ‘Hey – you’re forming a hit squad? We’ll join your hit squad, Ted and me. Life’s been pretty damned boring, since we retired. Let’s face it, one human being can only play so many games of double-deck pinochle in his lifetime, without going loopy.’

‘Thanks, Steve.’

 

The rest of the day passed slowly and quietly. Adeola closeted herself in her bedroom so that she could make phone calls to her contacts in Egypt, Iran, Syria and Palestine. One of her friends in the government offices in Qatar told her that, two or three weeks before the Dubai explosion, he had picked up rumours that DOVE negotiators might be the target of terror attacks. But the information had been so sketchy that he hadn’t thought it worth passing on. After all, DOVE received death threats from dozens of different terrorists and political pressure groups, on almost a daily basis.

Noah played double-deck pinochle with Rick and Ted and Steve, while Silja gave herself a pedicure and polished her nails. Leon sat on the couch, frowning at Adeola’s laptop, and occasionally making notes.

At lunchtime they ordered room service: club sandwiches and shrimp salad, and a bagel with cream cheese and lox for Leon.

In the middle of the afternoon, Leon said, ‘I can’t find anything more about the medallions. But this
Emu Ki Ilani
thing keeps on coming up. Back in the days of King Nebuchadnezzar, in 605 BC, it was like a whole political and religious concept – “to become like the gods”. Nebuchadnezzar wanted to keep every nation in turmoil, always struggling against each other, so that mankind would never become complacent and lazy.’

‘What’s wrong with complacent and lazy?’ asked Steve. ‘I
like
complacent and lazy.’

‘Anything about Professor Halflight?’ asked Noah.

‘Some. But it’s not very consistent. One website says he was born in Munich in November of 1938, and that his name was originally Julius Halblicht. But Wikipedia says he was born in Queens, New York, in August of 1937 and his name was originally Julius Halbrecht.

‘Whichever it was, he was educated at the Solomon Schechter High School in New York, and then the Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv. He graduated in 1961 but after that there’s nothing about him at all, where he went or what he did. He just kind of surfaces in 1984 as professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, and in 1993 as professor of Jewish history at UCLA.

‘I did find a picture of him, though, in 1993, on Google Image. Here, look.’

Leon clicked on to the Google image library and showed them a blurry black-and-white photograph of Professor Halflight sitting in a wheelchair. He must have been at a convention or a conference somewhere, because there were several square tables visible in the background, each with a flag on them, and name cards. He was much thinner than he was now, and he was wearing dark glasses and a neatly-trimmed beard. He was leaning forward and listening attentively to a man of about forty-five with black slicked-back hair, but the man’s face was completely obscured by the flag in front of him.

‘Does it say where this was taken, or who the other guy is?’ asked Rick.

‘No. It just says 1993.’

Rick examined the photograph more closely. ‘There’s a mirror behind him, and you can see some buildings and vehicles outside, and a couple of road signs. You want to make a print of this, Leon, and blow it up as much as possible? Maybe we can work out where this was.

‘And keep at it. You’re doing real good.’

 

Noah stayed beside Leon for a while.

‘You OK?’ he asked him.

Leon nodded. ‘At least this has given me something to keep my mind off it.’

‘You should call your uncle, ask about your dad’s funeral arrangements.’

‘Do you think I’ll be able to go?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe we can think of a way. We don’t even know if the coroner has released his remains yet. But we’ll have to be careful. These guys are looking for you just as much as they’re looking for me and Silja.’

Leon looked pale and tired. But he lifted his head and said, ‘I don’t mind so much about burying my dad, so long as I can bury the people who killed him.’

 

At 5 p.m., Bill Pringle called back.

‘How did your friend make out?’ asked Rick.

‘Oh . . . pretty good.’

‘Did he find another medallion?’

There was a lengthy pause, and then a cough, and then Bill said something indistinct.

‘Bill? Is everything OK? Did your friend find another medallion?’

‘Erm, sure. Everything’s fine. I think – I think you need to come to DC in person.’

‘Can’t you tell me over the phone? Or email me?’

Another cough.

‘Bill, are you sure that everything’s OK?’

‘Of course. But what I said earlier, about people listening. You know, Echelon.’

‘You haven’t had any trouble, have you?’

‘Everything’s fine, good buddy. Everything’s hunky-dory. But you really need to come here in person, so that I can explain this to you.’