Private L.A. (24 page)

Del Rio blinked, looked off into memory, said, “There is someone who might be able to tell us if they’re lying or not.”

“You know someone who’d know something like that?”

“You know him too, Jack, or did. Back in Kandahar?”

I thought about that, flashed on a face from our Afghanistan days before the helicopter crash, a big, doughy, cherub-faced man with cold, dark eyes, a fellow I’d once heard accurately described as having the look of an angel and the heart of an assassin.

“Guy Carpenter,” I said.

“The one and only.”

“That was ten years ago. I wouldn’t begin to know where to find someone like him. He’s an ultraspook, for God’s sake.”

“Ultraspook or not,” Del Rio said, “I got his address
and
phone number.”

“What? How?” I asked, incredulous.

Del Rio shot me a look of pity. “Guess you didn’t make the assassin’s list of friends and loved ones, Jack, but Carpenter sends yours truly a Christmas card each and every year.”

JUSTINE WOKE AT
a quarter past five the next morning with a colossal hangover dominated by a meat cleaver of a headache and a mouth that tasted of Very Rare Irish Whiskey and dried Elmer’s Glue.

How in God’s name did I get …?

She remembered being in Jack’s office on an empty stomach, whiskey that tasted oh so incredibly good and made her feel even better; and then it all went whirly on her, and then dark. She reached out, felt the dogs. One of them licked her hand.

Why did I …? How did I …?

Justine flashed on Jack bringing her into the apartment in a fireman’s carry and vaguely recalled saying something about …

“Oh, God,” she groaned into her pillow. “Please don’t let
that
be true.”

But was it? Had she confessed to Jack something about having perfect sex with a stranger, or something like that?

“Oh, God,” she groaned again. “Why? What am I going to …?”

And then she knew. Hangover or not, world-class headache or not, she was getting up. She was going to Crossfit. She was confronting what she’d done, and what it meant, and she was doing it now, not later. This was the kind of thing the old Justine would have done without hesitation. But why did she feel like this could be worse than returning to that jail cell in Guadalajara?

Twenty minutes later, after chugging a quart of water and swallowing a banana walnut muffin, two shots of espresso, and an Aleve, she pulled up to the Crossfit box, still unable to answer that question. She absolutely did not want to go inside. She knew the workout might force her to her knees, make her retch her insides out. But in a way, that kind of suffering felt fitting, a penance for her shitty choices of late, whatever their root cause.

Justine got out of the car, feeling only slightly less queasy than she had upon waking. Her ears rang. Her eyes felt swollen. Was that possible?

She trudged into the box, glanced around, seeing most of the regulars, but no Paul. She tried to smile at the trainer, said, “Did your sister have the baby, Ronny?”

“Girl,” he said, grinning. “Elena. Six pounds eleven ounces. Thanks for taking care of the place for me, telling everyone there was no class that day.”

“Only a couple of people showed anyway,” she said.

“Yeah, Paul said you and he did a workout with a bunch of pull-ups and push-ups,” the trainer said. “Too many, he said. He strained his back.”

“Oh,” Justine said, feeling her head pounding again. “That’s too bad.”

“Ready for this?” Ronny asked.

Justine turned her head to look at the whiteboard, saw the workout of the day posted there, and shuddered at the simple name: “Fran.”

Some Crossfit workouts had been given names, women’s names because they were like hurricanes. Of all the hurricanes, nothing was worse than Fran, which involved racing the clock to complete twenty-one thrusters, a move where you had to hold a sixty-five-pound barbell at your collarbone, squat, then explode the weight up overhead. Then you had to do twenty-one pull-ups, then fifteen thrusters, then fifteen pull-ups, then nine thrusters, then nine pull-ups.

Okay, little sister
, Justine thought miserably.
You’re about to suffer for your sins in a big, big way
.

JUSTINE FINISHED FRAN
in nine minutes forty seconds, a time that included two trips to the washroom to hurl the poisons from her system. But as she lay on the floor of the box, sweating like a horse, incapable of moving, her abs, hams, and shoulders on fire, she felt better for having suffered.

She had deserved to suffer.

“Know what I like about you, Justine?” Ronny said.

“What’s that?” she croaked.

“You don’t give up,” the trainer said, grinning. “You come in hungover to the gills, visit with Mr. Pukey twice, and you still go the whole nine yards. I like that in a person. Call me crazy, but I like someone who finishes what they start, no matter what.”

She managed a soft grin. “Thanks, Ronny. I think. I’ll let you know when my body stops twitching.”

The sun was up by the time Justine walked stiffly from the box. Her brain felt slightly scalded, but her head no longer pounded. Her stomach was much better, and she’d sweated most of the booze out of her system. She sat in her car, drank another quart of water, tried to figure out what to do.

Sooner the better. Now, not later.

Those old maxims guided Justine more than her emotions as she put the car in gear and drove through the streets toward the Bonaventure Charter School in Clarkdale, about six miles away.

Bonaventure was housed in a retrofitted apartment building on Mentone Avenue that had been bequeathed to the school’s founder by a wealthy aunt. Mission style and stucco finished, the school sat back from the road, fronted by a beautifully tended flower garden crisscrossed by brick walkways. It was still early, only seven fifteen, and the schoolyard stood empty.

Justine parallel parked across and down the street where she could see the walkways. She rolled down her window to get some air, hoping to spot Paul coming in before his students, hoping to right the course of her life somehow, or at least to find out exactly where the harsh winds of fate had brought her.

The first student, eight or nine, an African-American girl dressed in a school uniform of gray plaid skirt and white collared shirt, came down the sidewalk with her mother ten minutes later. She gave her mother a hug before skipping toward the school.

The girl put Justine very much in mind of Malia, the Harlows’ oldest daughter, and then of Jin and Miguel, and how they might be feeling more than a week into the disappearance of their parents, and four days into life under the control of Dave Sanders. Orphans to begin with, they had to be shocked and upended by finding themselves in that same wretched state again, alone at such a young age, trying to find an anchor, trying to cope, trying to survive a nightmare ordeal.

Seeing the children’s faces in her mind, Justine couldn’t help feeling admiration for the Harlows. Yes, there were things about Thom and Jennifer that she found troubling: not helping the women who worked for them to obtain citizenship; and those camera brackets in the roof of the panic room, aiming into their bedroom. But at the same time, when they really didn’t have to, the Harlows had adopted three needy orphans and had started up a foundation for the benefit of parentless children the world over. Justine tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, wondering about the foundation, realizing it was the only aspect of Thom’s and Jennifer’s lives that they knew little about.

Justine had seen the commercials, and the pictures of one or both of the Harlows in some far-flung and impoverished land, invariably holding a malnourished but utterly adorable child. The Harlows built schools and dorms and improved water resources for—

Justine’s attention wrenched to the street. Paul’s blue Toyota Camry was pulling up to the curb in front of one of Bonaventure’s walkways. He climbed out of the passenger side, grinning, looking tousle-haired and handsome as usual.

But Justine barely gave him a second glance. She was staring horrified at the pretty blond woman behind the steering wheel and the two young children sitting in car seats behind her. The mom blew a kiss to Paul, who caught it and then walked toward the school, his right hand massaging his lower back.

The Toyota pulled away and drove past Justine. The woman’s window was down. She was looking in the rearview mirror at her children, a boy, a girl, neither more than three. They were all singing, “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.”

“Oh, my God,” Justine whispered, her eyes brimming with bitter tears, her cheeks burning with utter shame. “What have I done?”

“NO PRISONERS SENT
an e-mail that appears, like the others, untraceable for the time being,” Mayor Wills informed a conference room crowded with city, county, state, and federal law enforcement. “They said they no longer wished to be paid in cash.”

Shortly after dawn, Mickey Fescoe had called to alert me to this meeting, waking me from a dead sleep in my own bedroom, a first since Del Rio had been injured. Fescoe briefed me on No Prisoners’ demands. I’d suggested I bring Kloppenberg and Maureen Roth along to get their perspective, and he’d agreed.

The three of us were standing against the back wall of the room, strictly observers, possibly advisors.

“How do they want it, then?” Sheriff Cammarata demanded.

“Electronic transfer of funds,” the mayor said somberly. “We’ll be texted or e-mailed an account number and routing information, then have ten minutes to respond with payment. If we arrange to pay today, it’s seven million dollars. If we don’t arrange to pay by midnight, the fee jumps to ten million. If we don’t arrange to pay by tomorrow midnight, eight will die.”

A grumble rolled through the room as people tried to get their heads around No Prisoners’ demands, see angles to those demands that might be exploited. To my surprise, when the grumbling drifted toward silence, Mo-bot was the first to offer advice.

“Mayor, if I were you, I’d be willing to move ten million tomorrow,” she said quite loudly and forcefully.

That offended Sheriff Cammarata, who looked at me and demanded, “Does she toss around ten million dollars in public money all the time, Morgan?”

But the mayor seemed surprised and looked at Mo-bot with great interest. “Why would I do that, Ms. Roth?”

Mo-bot shot the sheriff a belittling smile, said, “Because by waiting until tomorrow you’ll give us time to attach a digital bug to the transfer file, a bug that will follow that money wherever it goes, making the money retrievable.”

Even FBI Special Agent Christine Townsend seemed impressed. She looked at me. “Private can do that? I don’t even think we can do that.”

In all honesty, I didn’t think so, but before I could reply, Sci said, “Well, not Private, exactly, but friends of Maureen’s, folks from Cal Poly that we keep on retainer. I imagine they could put something like that together lickety-split.”

Imagine?
I thought.
Lickety-split?
I wondered if that was true. I mean, it was true that Private did have on retainer top scientists at Cal Poly, Stanford, and Berkeley. Whether they could devise a digital bug that would do what Mo-bot and Sci were suggesting, and overnight, was another story.

But I said, “I think it’s worth a fifteen-minute phone call on Maureen’s part to make sure this is, indeed, possible.”

“Go ahead, Ms. Roth,” Mayor Wills said, and Mo-bot left the room.

“What about the money?” asked the FBI special agent in charge. “Where are you going to get ten million dollars to transfer, even if you can get it back?”

Wills hesitated, then threw up her hands. “I honestly don’t know what I can do without opening myself up to a lawsuit, or worse, criminal charges should we fail to get the money back.”

“You could ask private citizens, Hollywood,” Chief Fescoe said. “Give them some kind of guarantee on the loan of the funds.”

The mayor didn’t like that either, and I didn’t blame her. No Prisoners had killed twenty-one people, including two police officers. Going to private citizens for the money smacked of an inability to handle the situation, not a good thing for a politician with aspirations to higher office.

“You could call the governor,” said Bill Ikeda, who was representing the criminal division of the California Department of Justice. “Under these circumstances he might be willing to authorize having the funds drawn from one of the general accounts. As long as the transfer carries this bug, I mean.”

“We don’t know if this bug will work!” the sheriff complained. “We’re …”

Mo-bot reentered the room. She was sipping a cup of coffee, noticed all eyes on her, and stopped. “What?”

“Can they make the bug?” the mayor asked.

“Oh,” she said, as if she’d been thinking of something else. “Of course.”

“How much is this bug going to cost?” Townsend asked me.

“Nothing,” I replied. “Private won’t take a dime for this, and neither will the computer scientists. We want to catch these guys and make L.A. safe again as much as you do.”

“I’VE GOT YOUR
back, but you’re going to have to take the lead on this,” I told Mo-bot as we exited City Hall, heading for our cars around nine thirty that morning. “How soon can the Cal Poly boys be here?”

“They’re all women,” she shot back. “And they’re on their way already, working in their car, if I know them. The key, of course, is where the money is coming from, and the nature of the files and security codes that surround transfers from whatever fund they end up tapping.”

I said, “I just want to know it will work.”

“It’ll work,” Sci said. “Think of it like a tick.”

“You mean as in dog tick?”

“Or deer tick, or in this case, digital file tick,” he replied. “The program they’ll devise will be tiny and will attach itself deep in the metadata of the transfer file. To any but the most sophisticated of coders, it will look simply like a string of numbers, an afterthought.”