The Florentine Deception (18 page)

I briefly considered informing my father that I was wide-awake, two minutes away from the hospital entrance, and could pick Papa up, but common sense prevailed.

“Good luck!” I said. “Give him my best and tell him I'm happy he's not a cadaver.”

My father grumbled uncharacteristically and then said “Goodnight, Alex,” and hung up.

It wasn't quite the ending I'd planned for, but better than most of the alternatives.

Remembering my promise to Papa and the beating I'd take from Steven if I cracked the seal on the panic room on my own, I headed back to Northridge for a well-deserved few hours of sleep.

Chapter 28

By six I gave up on trying to sleep, and with infomercials hawking Abdominators on all my regular TV stations and Steven undoubtedly experiencing rapid eye movements, I grabbed my laptop off the floor and propped it on my lap. After an eternally long boot-up and a few clicks I'd checked my stocks and deleted three offers for “v1agra” and one email from a long-lost Nigerian uncle looking to help me collect my rightful fifteen-million-dollar inheritance from our mutual Peruvian cousin, Juan Carlo.

Juan Carlo from Peru, no—but I did know a Fidel in Brazil—and he hadn't checked his email in two days. In all of the excitement, I'd completely forgotten my electronic surveillance drop box.

The summary webpage read: “
25 emails novos.
” Twenty-five new messages. My heart jumped. I quickly clicked the inbox button only to be rewarded by an endlessly spinning browser progress icon. Frustrated, I clicked the link several more times in rapid succession, and a second later the site acquiesced and displayed a list of the first twenty emails. Not one was from my spyware—from their identical subject lines, all clearly contained Latin-language spam. Dejected, I selected the lot and clicked the “delete” button. The site refreshed the page and listed the remaining five messages. The first four, like those on the previous page, were clearly junk; the last, however, had a Russian-looking sender name in indecipherable Cyrillic and a subject of “30/08/15 8:00am.” I'd netted my shark.

Eagerly, I clicked up the email and was presented with a transcript of Khalimmy's keystrokes. I scanned the first few lines:

google.com

Chinese takeout, 91601

Besides kidnapping, Khalimmy was also into Chinese food. A quick search of the accompanying zip code further revealed that he had a place somewhere in North Hollywood. Worth telling the police, I thought. I continued scrolling down through the text when I found this:

[email protected]

We need to meet. Our supplier is not cooperating and we've got to decide what to do with our security deposit SOON. Usual place for breakfast tomorrow @ 8:00am? AK

More bad news. Khalimmy was getting restless, and if he was keeping to his timetable, his “security deposit,” Ronald Lister, had less than twenty-four hours to live. Maybe less, if the email was any indication. But even if I handed the diamond over, what were the odds he'd keep his end of the deal? That was, assuming there was a diamond, and that it was in the panic room. Impulsively, I double-clicked the notepad icon and started constructing a forged reply from Khalimmy's associate:

From: [email protected]

To: Spirited One

Subject: RE: We need to meet

The usual location is no good. I'll explain when we meet. Instead, meet at the Griffith Park Observatory at 2800 East Observatory Road–stand right in front of the stairway up to the right telescope. Carry a book in your left hand if you think you've been followed, in the right otherwise. I might be a bit late. Watch your back. Don't call.

A seedling of a headache began sprouting behind my right temple; I'd need some caffeine soon. Shaking it off, I proceeded to spend the next fifteen minutes scouring several of the more well-known hacker sites for a list of lax email servers—these improperly secured computer systems, usually located in Sub-Saharan Africa and other less tech-savvy areas of the world, were favorites of the hacker community because they would accept an email from anyone and forward it to anyone without any authentication. Many of these servers had been blacklisted, cut off from the rest of the Internet, because of the droves of spam they spewed. Others had gone largely unnoticed by the spammers and could still be used for occasional mischief. I picked one located in Zambia and sent my spoofed email to Khalimmy's email account, forging the “from” address as
[email protected]—the address of Khalimmy's contact
. I hit Enter and a few seconds later, the slipshod server reported the email's successful transmission. Now the only question was whether Khalimmy would see it before heading to his original rendezvous. This was my one chance to see the bastard, get his license plate number and if all worked out, save Richard Lister's brother. I crossed my fingers. Either way, my next stop was Griffith Park, hopefully with Steven.

By half past six, I couldn't contain myself any longer so I punched Steven's home number into my cordless and counted the rings impatiently. At four, his home phone answering machine picked up.

“Hi, we're not here—”

Dammit.

I hung up and keyed in his mobile number, but this too went immediately to voicemail. This time I left a message: “Hey Steven, give me a call as soon as you can. I need your help—it's urgent. I'm heading over to Griffith Observatory right now.”

“Shit.” I had no desire to do this alone. But what choice did I have?

I found a ratty Dodgers baseball cap in the closet and pulled on a pair of wraparound sunglasses. Fifteen minutes later I was flying down the 118, incognito in my hat, glasses, and scruffy jogger's attire.

Chapter 29

The first waves of heat were already radiating from the Griffith Park blacktop by the time I pulled off Observatory Road and into the sparsely occupied lot. I was cutting it a bit close, my anticipated seven-twenty arrival dashed by a disemboweled purple couch occupying the third and fourth southbound lanes of the I-5 freeway. With no time to spare, I threw a small bottle of water into my shorts and began jogging toward the observatory. Aside from an early morning runner and his retriever, the park appeared deserted; only a few cars with staff decals peppered the lot, and as far as I could see, the mysterious Khalimmy had yet to take his place in front of the right-hand stairwell. Reaching the edge of the asphalt, I gingerly stepped over the foot-high wooden partition marking the start of the hike and continued up the dirt trail and around a loop-back until I reached an elevation that afforded me a comprehensive view of the building's grassy quad, the towering concrete Astronomer's Monument, and most importantly, the base of the rightmost stairwell.

Satisfied with my vantage, I leaned against a hollowed-out oak, donned earphones, and began playing Pink Floyd's
The Final Cut
. Within minutes, the back of my neck was hot to the touch and a film of sticky perspiration clung to my face; a quarter of an hour more of vicious heat convinced me that my skin was worth more than a perfect view of the stairwell, so I sat on an exposed, age-polished root along the shaded west side of the tree and rested against the weathered bark. From this position, I figured I could just see the head of anyone approaching the right telescope—it'd be good enough. Besides, it was already twenty after, and I was quickly losing hope that Khalimmy had received my early morning message.

At twenty past, a bald head—all I could see was a sunburned forehead—stopped by the stairs and faced the monument. Encouraged, I paused the album and rose to my feet. The head was attached to a pear-shaped specimen, late forties, wearing a white “Alaska” t-shirt, gray floppy sweat-shorts, black socks and Birkenstocks. After a second of rummaging through a blue denim fanny pack, he withdrew a digital camera and motioned his children, who I'd managed to ignore in my initial excitement, toward Galileo's statue. Wearily, I settled back onto my root and continued listening.

Three subsequent sightings over the next twenty minutes were equally fruitless, and finally, certain of the failure of my last-minute plan and miserably hot and sticky, I rose to my feet, peeled the moist shirt from my back, and trudged back down the path. All went smoothly until about a swimming pool's length from the end of the trail. Here, the grade steepened, causing me to accelerate, and before I could react, I had snared my running shoe on the wooden partition. Try as I might to balance myself, my forward momentum was too great, my shoelace too strong, and the laws of physics immutable.

My body followed the path of a windshield wiper and a fraction of a second later I lay facedown on the ground with a throbbing right cheek and tingling, burning palms, no doubt shredded from grating over the coarse asphalt.

“Goddammit, you almost knocked me over!” shouted an irritated voice from a few feet away.

Roused from my shock but still unable to speak, I tried to prop myself up and look toward the voice but merely collapsed in the attempt. A moment later, I felt someone jimmy my foot from the partition.

“Here, take my hand.”

“Okay,” I think I managed to respond.

A pair of large hands assisted me until I rested more or less steadily on the pavement. Several constellations of red dots and scrapes covered my palms and I could feel trickles of blood running from my cheek. I looked up at the man, less stunned now.

“Sorry about that,” I said. The man was in his fifties, a solid six feet, graying stubble adorning acne-pocked cheeks and a mess of thinning, wavy brown-gray hair. He wore an old pair of brown slacks and a white, short-sleeved dress shirt reminiscent of those worn by the NASA mission control guys in
Apollo 13
.

“Why don't you watch where you're going?” he spat. His accent was vaguely Middle Eastern. He looked down at his watch nervously.

“Sorry. I tripped,” I said. “Thanks again for the hand.”

He grunted, then took a step back, bent over and picked up a Stephen King paperback from the pavement. Jutting out from between its pages was a folded printout—I caught a glimpse of the top—a printout of my forged email.

Jesus Christ, it was him.

Khalimmy stared at me a long second, shook his head, then turned and hurried toward the quad. Then after a moment's hesitation, he made an about-face, walked up to a vintage red Mustang parked at the other side of the lot, and grabbed a bottle of water through the rolled-down passenger-side window.

Still perched on the wooden divider, I watched him make his way to the right stairwell and take a seat upon an adjacent concrete wall, and, after a brief scan of the area, with an obvious mocking “what kind of paranoia is this?” look on his face, he deliberately transferred the novel to his right hand and began reading.

Convinced he was now thoroughly preoccupied with his book, I hobbled over to my car and popped the trunk, which in addition to my climbing gear, held a case of water bottles, a first aid kit, and a gym towel. I uncapped a bottle, then another, and poured them over my stinging face, arms, and legs to wash off the blood and debris. Then I dried the scrapes with a roll of paper towels and shoved the blood-soaked lot into an old plastic bag. Once I finished, I shot a look back at Khalimmy, who was still engrossed in his book.

I needed to get a look at his license plate. I rose and made for a trail that skirted the edge of the parking lot, in an effort to surreptitiously gain a better view. Then my smartphone began ringing.

“Alex, where the hell are you?” asked Steven.

“Good morning to you too,” I responded, still limping toward the trail. “It's about time!”

“What happened last night? You're obviously not in jail. Or are you?” he reconsidered.

“I'm here with the guy,” I stammered. “I mean the kidnapper guy, the Khalimmy guy, he's thirty yards away.”

“What?”

“Didn't you get my message?”

“No, we just got up.”

“Listen, it's a long story, but I've almost got his license plate number—”

“Where are you?”

“Griffith Park.”

“What? Why the hell are you at Griffith?”

“Later,” I said. “I just wanted to get the guy's plate and take off, but now he's seen me. So it's a little more complicated….”

“He what?” he yelled into the phone. “But there's no way he'd know who you are, right?”

“I don't know. I don't think so,” I said uncertainly. I reached the trail and began hobbling counterclockwise around the lot.

“Can you get his license plate? The police could probably look up his address in a second.”

“I'm working on it.” I continued around the perimeter and limped nonchalantly toward a Park bulletin board until part of the Mustang's rear plate finally came into view. The plate's first four characters read “6CWH.” I leaned in to try to catch the last three digits but they were obscured by a rusting metal pole. I needed to get closer. I shot a look back at Khalimmy.

“Crap.”

“What?”

“He's getting up. One minute.”

Khalimmy rose, followed the wall to a blue recycling container, and pushed his plastic bottle through the small round opening; then after a moment's hesitation, he walked purposefully toward the main entrance.

“I think he's going inside. Hold on, I've got an idea.” I shoved the phone into my right pocket.

Once Khalimmy had disappeared behind the tinted glass doors I hobbled over to the passenger-side window of his Mustang, took a second glance over my shoulder at the entrance, and reached through the open window for the glove box latch. The small steel button stubbornly resisted a gentle push so I delivered it a second, less forgiving stab and with a crack, the latch gave and the door shot open and onto its hinges.

Ignoring Steven's mumbles from my pocket, I plunged my hand into the box and rummaged through the detritus until I found what I was looking for: a rubber band-bound, red-plastic-sleeved owner's manual. With a gentle tug, the band, crusty with age, snapped and fell to the seat. I'd worry about that later; right now I was interested in the registration slip, which to my satisfaction had been tucked into the inner pocket of the sleeve.