The Memory Collector (17 page)

He dropped a knee onto the man’s back and put the barrel to his skull. “Who are you?”

Sounding shocked, the man said, “This is my boat.”

“It isn’t. What do you want?”

The man gave up the pretense. Through clenched teeth, his voice roughened. “You’re in trouble. You haven’t delivered and the deadline’s coming.”

Kanan slid his knee up to the back of the man’s neck and pressed his weight against it. “Where are they?”

The man’s face grew red. “Deliver the stuff.”

“You want to walk out of this alive? Tell me.”

“The stuff. Or go fuck yourself.” The man raised a hand to his throat. “Air . . . get off.”

Kanan pulled his arm back like a batter winding up and swung the pistol across the man’s forehead. The man’s skin split and his eyes unfocused. A skid mark of blood pulsed from the cut. His head flopped against the floor.

Kanan rifled the man’s pockets. He found a driver’s license and cell phone. The man’s name was Ken Meiring. He scrolled through the phone’s call register.

A 650 number.

Kanan stopped. He knew that number. What the hell?

He scrolled further. The number appeared again, and again, and again.

“Oh, God,” he said. He had wondered who was behind everything. But not . . . “Christ.”

Beneath him Meiring bunched and groaned. Drool slipped from his mouth. Kanan pressed the weight of his knee against Meiring’s neck. As he did, his hand hit the phone’s camera function. A stored photo popped on-screen.

It was a snapshot of Seth.

Kanan gaped at it. A snapshot of Seth on his bike, riding to school.

The dense rock in his chest seemed to burn. “You stalked my son? You brought him into this?”

Meiring struggled beneath him, lips pulled back, groaning and trying to squirm away. “We can all still go home winners. Don’t fuck this up.”

Seth. His boy. Kanan could barely see. His voice cracked like a ruined china bowl. “Tell me where they are. Or I will kill you.”

Meiring kicked out and tried to grab Kanan’s arm. “Kill me and you’re screwed.”

Kanan pressed the barrel of the pistol against Meiring’s temple. “Forget going home a winner. You want to go home?
Tell me.
”

Meiring’s eyes flicked to the pistol’s safety, which was off, and the trigger, which had Kanan’s finger on it.

“Don’t—Christ, okay, I’ll . . . they’re down the peninsula.”

“Where?”

“I’ll take you.”

“Where?”

“No way.”

Like a bell had begun ringing, Kanan made the connection. The familiar number in Meiring’s cell phone. Down the peninsula. Jesus Christ.

“Off San Antonio Road in Mountain View,” he said flatly.

Meiring’s eyes widened.

Shit.
That was the address. An old ranch house, supposedly used as a rental—but these people were using it for a safe house. That’s where everything began and ended.

A terrible urgency filled him. He had to get there. And he had to write it down before he forgot it.

“San Antonio Road in Mountain View. San Antonio Road . . .”

He looked around for something to write with. He stretched and reached for a drawer. Beneath him Meiring roared. Bucking like an animal, he threw him off balance. Kanan fell against the bench. Meiring rolled and began punching like a madman. Kanan wrestled him onto his back, wrapped his thighs around the man’s head, and squeezed him in a crazed wrestling lock.

“San Antonio Road Mountain View,” he said.

He pulled out a drawer. Junk poured across the floor. He grabbed a marker with his left hand. Meiring grunted and fought for purchase with his feet. Kanan squeezed his legs around Meiring’s neck and pulled off the cap of the pen with his teeth. Meiring groaned, dug his heels into the floor, and arched his back. His fists windmilled, batting at Kanan’s legs.

Kanan pressed the marker to the fiberglass floor. Wrote
San An—

With a strangled roar, Meiring broke free from the headlock. Kanan brought up the gun but Meiring elbowed him in the face and thumped to his feet and fled up the stairs.

Hold on to the words, hold on—
Christ, he needed Meiring, alive and talking, because he would forget. Meiring knew everything and he was getting away.

Kanan scrambled to his feet. Up top, Meiring stuttered across the deck. His foot clipped a cleat. He lost his balance. Lurching for the edge, he tried to jump for the dock. He missed.

With a shout, he fell from sight.

Kanan heard a splash. He stared out the cabin door at the empty deck and the blue sky. The sunlight stung his eyes. Gulls shrieked overhead. He put a hand against the cabin wall for balance.

Where was he?

He held still and oriented himself. He was aboard
Somebody’s Baby
.

He had an HK pistol in his hand. The cabin door was jimmied open and a drawer had been dumped on the floor. He was out of breath and his shoulder hurt, maybe from breaking open the door. He didn’t recognize the pistol, but if it had been in the drawer, it would do. He ejected the magazine. It was full. He inserted it again and cleared the chamber.

He heard splashing outside, and a fearful cry.

He ran up the stairs to the deck. Bending over the rail, he saw a man in the water below, desperation on his face.

The guy was heavyset, and his forehead was bleeding. He struggled to the boat and slapped the hull, trying to get purchase. He sank under the surface and came up spitting.

Like goddamned Chuck Lesniak in the Zambezi River, clawing to get back aboard the jet boat.

“Hang on,” Kanan said.

He hesitated, then pulled off his denim shirt, stuck the HK and his phone in the sleeves, and set it on the deck. He knelt, reached down, and snagged the collar of the man’s shirt.

“Calm down. I got you.”

To his shock, the man shouted, grabbed his arm with both hands, and pulled him overboard.

Kanan hit face-first and plunged into water so cold that it burned. He came up gasping and saw the man’s face. It looked like an out-of-control freight train.

The man was one of them.

He grabbed Kanan’s hair and scythed his elbow around Kanan’s neck like a wrecking crane swinging its claw arm. They went down together.

Knees, elbows, fingers, enormous strength quickening around Kanan’s windpipe. They sank and twisted, legs locking. The man’s grip was crushing.

The light dimmed. Below the surface the water was the color of coal slag. His lungs and bones and skin screamed at him.
Air
.

He fought the panic, brought up his knee, and reached into the side of his boot. His arm felt sluggish in the water. The night came at him from the edges of his world, gray and then black around the corners of his eyes, a tunnel, telescoping to a single point at the center of the big man’s belly. He pulled the dagger from his boot.

He drove his arm forward, at the last gray point of daylight in the center of his vision.

The blade struck through cloth and skin, through fat and fascia and muscle, to the core. With a gush, the water warmed around Kanan’s hand. The fat man relinquished his grip around his throat.

Warmth spread in the water. Kanan pulled the knife out and pushed the man away and kicked for the surface. The sun above was a dim pinprick.

The pain in his lungs was intense. Unable to fight it any longer, he breathed. And his lips, his nose, his eyes crested the surface. Gasping, he sank back beneath the water. Kicked. This time he came up and stayed up, gulping oxygen. The slate gray hole at the end of the tunnel brightened and expanded to dark water and the gleaming white hull of the boat. He grabbed the mooring line.

A plume of blood was muddying the water.

No bubbles. The breath had already been expelled from the man’s lungs and rolled upward to rejoin the atmosphere.

Kanan hung on the line. The blood spread around him in luxuriant swirls. He needed to get away.

Letting go of the mooring line, he swam through the frigid water to the far side of the sailboat. He dunked himself, again and again, washing off the fat man’s blood. He climbed up the fixed ladder. On the deck he found his denim shirt. His phone and a pistol were wrapped inside.

He put on the shirt and stuck his phone in the shirt pocket. He worked the gun into the small of his back. He slid the knife back into the edge of his boot.

He hopped to the dock and walked, shivering, away from the sailboat. In the parking lot he saw a red Navigator. He had a set of keys in his pocket, and they opened the doors.

Teeth chattering, he stood by the Navigator and pulled off his denim shirt and the soaked Fade to Clear T-shirt beneath. His arms were covered with writing. Some of the ink had run. He found a Sharpie in the glove compartment and copied over every letter, slowly, until each word and name was vivid and sharp and black.

He stared at the word. If he ever saw his family again, would they understand? Would “I did this for you” keep him from being ruined in their eyes?

He had a vehicle. He had a knife and a handgun. He wished to fuck he had any information.

He got in the Navigator and started the engine.

13

P
hone to her ear, Jo paced the hallway in the radiology department at San Francisco General. Tang paced the other way, chewing her thumbnail. Ron Gingrich’s girlfriend, Clare, leaned against the wall and watched them go back and forth like dots in a game of Pong.

Jo hung up her phone. “Still can’t get hold of anybody knowledgeable at Chira-Sayf. I’m going down there.”

Tang’s face looked like a closed fist. “Take it to them. Find out what they’re cooking up in their lab and whether Kanan is sprinkling it around. Don’t take no for an answer. Attack, attack, attack.”

“If you get any news about the MRI, call me.”

Clare clutched herself tightly, like a little kid. “What’s wrong with Ron?”

“I can’t say for certain. Let’s hope it’s nothing serious,” Jo said.

She left, feeling like a liar.

Forty minutes later she pulled the Tacoma into the headquarters of Chira-Sayf Incorporated. The company occupied a quad of sandstone-and-smoked-glass buildings in a Santa Clara business park. The birches were just beginning to leaf out. The parking lot was full of sleek new cars. CHIRA-SAYF was chiseled in a block of stone on the landscaped lawn. That spoke of permanence, or of a CEO with hubris and excess cash on hand.

Inside the main building, the atmosphere was cool, quiet, and minimalist. The receptionist told her to wait.

Jo looked around. No chairs, no place to sit. No plants, just an eso terically arranged rock garden. The only thing that offered hospitality was a rack of brochures: stiff, glossy promotional material about the company. Her Chinese acquaintances would have a field day with the feng shui of the place.

Jo paced. The air-conditioning hummed like a mantra. After ten minutes, she took a brochure from the display. Maybe she could fold origami while she waited. Create a paper menagerie of swans and field mice and nanobots.

“Dr. Beckett.”

At the sound of clicking heels, Jo looked up. A woman in her forties walked into the lobby, hands clasped. She had a square face, square figure, flyaway blond hair. And a look in her eyes like a beachcomber watching a rogue wave roll toward her.

Jo knew that when she told people, “Hi, I’m performing a psychiatric evaluation on your employee who’s wanted by the police,” it went down like a glass of nails. She smiled and extended her hand. “Ms. Calder?”

The woman shook, briefly, with just her fingers. “I believe my admin told you to speak to our H.R. representative.”

Calder’s voice sounded thin in person, and Jo caught the undertone of a Southern drawl. Jo put a note of bright certainty into her reply.