Geek Mafia (41 page)

He looked over to her in the passenger seat as she pulled her pants back on. She was expounding upon the merits of San Diego as a good hide-away option during the winter. He reached over and put his finger to her lips. She looked at him curiously.

"I love you, Chloe," he said, his heart in his throat.

"I love you too, Paul," she replied without a second's pause, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

As if he was a moron to have ever thought otherwise.

"You do?" he asked.

She laughed and kissed him. Then kissed him again, harder. "Of course I do, didn't you know that? Why else would I do all this?"

He didn't know if he'd known it or not. But now...Now her phone was ringing.

They both looked at the phone, which had fallen on the floor of the back seat, in surprise. Chloe twisted around and picked it up, looking at the display screen. All it said was Private Name, Private Number, which meant it was probably either a telemarketer or a crewmember. She watched it ring for a moment before finally deciding to answer.

"Hello?" she asked. Paul couldn't make out the voice on the other end. "Bee?" she said in astonishment.

"Where are you? Are you ok?"

Paul watched as Chloe's face turned from surprise and worry to intense resolve and concentration. "I don't know about that," she said. A long pause. "Ok, Ok, I trust you. You know I do." Another long pause. "Yes, yeah, fine. Yeah, I know the place. See you then."

"Is Bee ok?" Paul asked.

"I think so," she said. "But she says she needs help. She wants us to meet her."

"Oh Christ," said Paul. "That doesn't sound like a good fucking idea."

"No," Chloe agreed, "It doesn't. But we have to go."

"What if she's with Raff?"

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"She's not," Chloe insisted. "She's not."

"Are you sure?"

"No," she said, her voice barely a whisper.

"Do you have a plan?"

"No."

They both stared at each other, although really they were staring past one another, thinking out all the possible dangers ahead of them. Paul realized that he couldn't even fathom what the dangers might actually turn out to be and so it was best to get on with it and find out first hand.

"Fine," said Paul. "But I'm driving."

They pulled into the parking lot of a ten room motel in south San Jose, a largely Hispanic neighborhood that Paul, given his isolated techie existence, had never even driven through, much less stopped in. He consoled himself with the thought that it had been less than an hour since they lost their pursuers on the freeway and therefore whatever trap they might have set couldn't be too terribly complex.

Paul recognized one of the cars in the lot as Bee's small hatchback. The Crew usually changed cars as easily as clothes, and it was a surprise to see that Bee was so openly advertising her presence to anyone who knew her. He wasn't sure what to make of that.

"What do you make of that?" he asked Chloe.

"I dunno. Other than the fact that Bee's probably actually in there." She pointed to Room 8, which was the only one with a light on inside. "Just like she said she would be."

They'd spent the last ten minutes cruising the neighboring streets, scanning for other hidden cameras with Chloe's laptop and looking for any familiar cars or faces. Everything had come up clean. With no more precautions to take, they'd run out of excuses to not go in. Except, Paul thought, for the obvious excuse that it was a bad idea.

"Why're we doing this again?" he asked for the tenth time since they'd gotten Bee's call. She decided to ignore him this time. She pulled her stun gun from her bag and then leaned forward and tucked it into the back of her pants before pulling her shirt down over it. Paul backed the car into the space right in front of room 8, so they could make a quick escape if they needed to.

"I'll keep the motor running," he said as she opened the door.

"And your eyes open," she said, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek. "If I run into trouble, I'll call in the cavalry."

Paul held up his cell phone. "That's me, a cavalry of one. I'll have my horse saddled and ready to go," he said with a wan smile. She winked at him and went to the motel room door.

He sat in the car and tried his best to look everywhere at once, but it wasn't working for him, so he concentrated on watching Chloe in the rearview mirror. She knocked lightly on the door and waited. After a few seconds she put her hand on the doorknob and turned it herself. Paul got a glimpse of yellow light from inside but nothing else. She slipped into the room without opening the door all the way and then closed it CHAPTER 40

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behind her.

Paul sighed and scanned the quiet night around him. Across the street was a gas station and a small strip mall with a several shops and a restaurant. All the signs were in Spanish and all the businesses were closed. He tensed as a pickup truck passed by on the street, but it didn't even slow down and the driver never took his eyes off the road. He supposed Raff or the PI could be in any of the empty storefronts or in any of the adjacent motel rooms. For that matter, they could've been waiting inside with Bee and had Chloe in their clutches right now.

As the seconds ticked by without any sign from Chloe, another possibility crept unwanted into his head. What if Chloe was setting him up? Was it possible, even after everything that had happened? Was all this the most complicated con imaginable, a massive plot to steal his money? Given the fact that Winston had gotten shot earlier that seemed impossible. Raff and Chloe were definitely at odds at this point, no doubt about that, but what about Bee and Chloe? Could they be planning something? Why else would Chloe risk coming here if not for the sake of some pre-arranged agreement with Bee?

His phone buzzed in his lap, starting him out of his reverie. He looked down at the face and saw Chloe's name. Huh?

"Hello?" he said.

"Act cool. Nonchalant," said Chloe, "But calmly get out of the car and come in here right now."

"Wh..."

"Right now," she insisted.

He turned the engine off and got out of the car, the phone still in his hand. He wondered if talking on the phone made him look more or less calm and decided he'd find out what was going on soon enough and so he kept his hand and the phone at his side. The motel room door opened easily and he stepped inside.

In the middle of the dingy room stood Bee and Chloe. The single queen sized bed was covered with electronics, including a laptop with its display open and facing the doorway. It took Paul a moment to understand what he was seeing on the screen.

"Shut the door," hissed Bee.

Paul reached behind him to knock the door shut, all the while keeping his eyes locked on the screen. There he saw an image of himself from a vantage point above and behind him, looking through the motel room door.

There were cross-hairs on the back of his head. As the door slammed shut they moved and focused on the peephole.

"What the fuck," said Paul.

"It's a trap," said Chloe.

"Sorry..." said Bee, meekly.

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CHAPTER 41

"What the fuck am I looking at?" Paul asked as he stared at the image of the motel room door on the computer monitor. The red, superimposed crosshairs were almost, but not quite, dead on the peephole. All three of them in the room were careful not to stand anywhere near the door.

"It's..."Bee started to explain. "It's a live feed from a camera across the street...I'm tapping into the signal from whoever's controlling it."

"And the crosshairs?" Paul asked.

"Well, I think it's because the camera's on a gun, but there's no way to be sure," she stared back at the screen.

"It's really pretty clever if you think about it..."

"Someone's pointing a remote controlled gun at us?" Paul didn't much care if it was clever or not.

"A rifle probably," Bee said distantly, her eyes locked on the screen.

"Oh my God..." said Paul, stepping further away from the door.

Chloe gently gripped Bee by the shoulders and turned the small woman to face her. "Bee, listen to me, please.

Is this Raff's gun camera? Is Raff controlling it?"

"I think maybe so," said Bee. "It's definitely my equipment he's using anyway. Stolen from the house when they cleared everything out earlier. So if it's not you guys then it's got to be Raff. Or maybe someone else."

Her voice was distracted, distant. Paul thought she sounded like she was in shock, which didn't surprise him since he felt the same way himself.

"Why didn't he shoot us then?" Paul asked, panic working its way from his brain and into his voice. "If I was in his sights, why didn't he fucking shoot me?"

"Because he doesn't know if we've got the money with us," Chloe said. Amazingly, her voice was still calm.

"But now he's got us trapped in here, right?" Paul said as he looked around the tiny room. Bed, dresser, TV, bathroom. No rear exits. No other windows besides the one facing the front. No escape.

"Yeah, but he's right about one thing," Chloe said, "We don't have the money with us. If he wants that he's going to have to deal. We've got some leverage here. All we have to do is wait for him to contact us and then we'll talk our way out of this."

"Simple as that, huh?" Paul said.

"Simple as that," she assured him. "He'll call. Trust me, he won't want to come busting down that door until he knows more about what we've got in here." Chloe turned back to Bee and scanned the piles of electronics and black plastic cases that covered the bed and spilled out onto the floor. "What do we have here anyway, Bee?"

The engineer sat down on the bed amidst her equipment, like a child surrounded by her stuffed animals. "It's just everything that I could salvage when the word came down from Kurt to bug out of the house this afternoon."

"This afternoon?" said Chloe in surprise. "Not this evening?"

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"No, this afternoon. After Raff and Kurt went to meet with you guys at the Great Mall, he called in and gave us the signal to bug out. We'd already half packed up everything anyway, once we saw Paul on TV. It was a madhouse getting everything together and once it turned dark we moved out all the important stuff. I took everything I could fit into my car."

"Is there a fallback point?" Chloe asked

"We're supposed to call in to a number. Kurt and Raff said they'd set it up," Bee said. "But I don't think that's going to happen, do you? I don't think they're going to set up a fallback at all..." Bee's voice trailed off and she looked around lovingly at her equipment. "They're all gone..."

Paul looked at Chloe and asked, "What is she talking about?"

"The crew has bugged out from the house," Chloe said. "It's like an emergency procedure when everything just goes to shit. Everybody packs up anything that might be valuable or incriminating or even vaguely interesting to the police. Then they split up and go their separate ways. Everyone goes somewhere else and no one knows where anyone else is hiding. All they have is a number or a Web site address or something where they can check in for further instructions about how we're supposed to get back together."

"And Raff gave this order?"

"Sounds like it. And he had Kurt backing him up. Except of course Kurt and Raff and Filo didn't bug out.

They came after us instead, with their friend and his gun."

Bee's attention snapped to Chloe when she heard this. "What?" she asked.

Chloe cleared a space on the bed and sat down next to Bee, putting a comforting hand on her friend's knee.

"Raff tried to kill me and Paul earlier. He's working with that Private Eye who attacked Paul on the highway.

He's the one who set up the whole thing from the beginning - the one who invited Paul's old coworker to the fundraiser. It was all a set up."

Bee looked heart-stricken. "Why?" she asked. "Why would he turn on you like that? Was it because of Paul?"

"He didn't turn on just me and Paul," Chloe insisted. "He betrayed all of us. Look what he's done, Bee! He brought in the police and went to an outsider for help in fucking the rest of us over."

Bee thought about this for a long time, while Chloe and Paul looked on in awkward silence. She looked down at her hands, fidgeting with a paper clip. When Chloe decided she wasn't going to say anything else, she said,

"Bee, is there anything here that can help us? Maybe a way to jam the signal that's controlling the gun or something like that..."

But Bee didn't seem to have heard her. Instead of answering Chloe's question she said, "To be fair, Chloe, you brought in an outsider first, right?"

"Huh?" said Chloe. "You mean Paul?"

"Yes. He was supposed to be another mark right? When you called me from that Mexican restaurant and asked me to check his picture and name. You said you had a live one. A live mark." Bee never looked up from her hands as she said this. "That's what you said. You said I should look up everything I could find on him as quick as possible and text you if he was a good mark. And when I found out he was really the founder of that game company, I did that. I told you he was a good mark."

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It took Paul a minute to really understand what Bee was saying. She was talking about the day he'd met Chloe at the Senor Goldstein's. The day he'd been fired. He remembered Chloe talking on the phone. At the time he'd thought she was calling into her bosses at the market research firm she worked for, which seemed perfectly plausible under the circumstances. He hadn't thought about it since, but in retrospect he realized that of course she was calling someone in the Crew. And apparently that someone was Bee.

"Bee, come on, that's different," Chloe protested. "We need to focus on our big fucking problem of the moment." She pointed to the screen on the laptop. "That gun that's pointed right at us."

"All Raff wants is the money, right?" said Bee, her voice level and empty of emotion. "The money we were supposed to steal from Paul in the first place. Why not just give it to him? Just give him the money and we'll call everyone back together and move back into the house and..."