The Memory Collector (28 page)

“Tang’s swinging by to get me.” She put a hand on his chest. “Rain check?”

“I’m picking you up for dinner at eight. And tonight’s weather forecast is for clear skies.” Though his tone was light, his gaze turned solemn. “You copacetic about going to SFO to deal with an air accident scenario?”

“Rock solid.”

“That’s the attitude.”

His concern touched her. His belief in her strength touched her more. But what remained unspoken, uncertain, and buried worried her most of all.

22

I
n the fading March light, Jo and Tang slipped quietly into the back of the room in a remote operations area at the San Francisco airport. Airline officials and police officers stood toward the back. The NTSB go team, three investigators in polo shirts and khakis, sat at a table talking to flight attendant Charlotte Thorne.

Thorne’s hair had been whipped into a mess. Her uniform jacket was torn, and she had a bruise across one cheek.

She looked haunted. “Stef seemed disorientated. Yes.”

“How so? Can you describe it?” asked one of the NTSB investigators.

“Twice she stood up to begin the beverage service. Once while we were still taxiing into takeoff position, the second time when we’d only been airborne for ten seconds. Both times she seemed baffled when I asked her to sit down.”

Jo looked across the tarmac toward the bay. The 747 had been towed to a hangar on the far side of the runway and sat empty in the sunset. The jet, so sleek and powerful, looked strangely chilling.

Tang leaned toward her and whispered, “It’s not going to come after you.”

Jo gave her a look.

Tang thought she was phobic about flying. She wasn’t. She simply hated it. She wouldn’t even keep a copy of
Top Gun
in the house.

Copacetic, Beckett
. Gabe understood the source of her hatred. He had been the P.J. on the scene the day of the air accident that killed Daniel.

Thorne dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “Then Stef said she was hot and needed air. She tore off her restraints and rushed to the far side of the airplane. It was like she couldn’t breathe. Like she felt trapped.” Thorne had a hitch in her voice. “When the door opened she was gone just like that. The passenger from twelve-B, Mr. Pankhurst, he went straight after her.”

Jo and Tang listened to the NTSB investigators question Thorne for several minutes. Jo knew they might continue for hours. She raised her hand, identified herself, and said, “Two questions.”

“Dr. Beckett, yes, I remember you,” Thorne said.

“You said Ms. Nivesen seemed disoriented. Do you mean she seemed confused—as in, she couldn’t string her thoughts together? Or did she seem coherent, but forgetful?”

Thorne exhaled. “Forgetful. She couldn’t seem to remember where we were. Even before the flight, she was late—I rang her repeatedly, and each time she sounded surprised to hear from me. Insisted I hadn’t spoken to her.”

“Second question.” Jo glanced out the window at the 747. “On the flight from London yesterday, did Ms. Nivesen have physical contact with Ian Kanan?”

The cops, the airline people, and the NTSB investigators turned toward her.

Thorne’s voice was rocky. “Yes. Stef helped hold him down, and afterward she had scratches and blood on her hands.”

“Thank you,” Jo said.

She led Tang out of the room and strode along the hall. “Contact public health. Everybody who had physical contact with Kanan aboard the flight yesterday needs to be examined ASAP.”

“You had contact with him.”

“No broken skin, no contact with bodily fluids.”

She glanced at Tang and saw concern in her eyes. She inhaled and felt it turn into a gulp.

“I know. We have fuck-all information about what’s contaminating people and how it’s transmitted,” she said.

“We’ll pull Alec Shepard and the entire workforce at Chira-Sayf in for questioning. Raid the business if we have to.”

Passing a window, Jo glanced again at the 747, gleaming red with the light of sunset. “Do that. But I think the horse has already bolted from the barn. Something has escaped from Chira-Sayf’s lab, and it’s on the verge of getting out of control.”

Nico Diaz leaned against a shelf in the back room at the sporting goods store, arms crossed, his expression poised between anger and disbelief.

“You’re moving fine, talking sense. You sure about this memory thing?” Diaz said.

“Ask me in five minutes if I remember this conversation.”

“How long till it improves?”

“I’m not counting on it.”

The orange light of sunset filtered through the frosted glass window at the back of the stockroom. Diaz stewed. Kanan had seen that look on the man’s face before, when a mission had taken a random turn into ambush or death.

Diaz was a man of few words and long silences. He was also a man of minimal bravado. He didn’t swagger or clothe himself with machismo. He didn’t care about visible projections of power. He moved without wasted motion, without wasted emotion, with no display. He looked like a mellow dude with dreads, and people sometimes mistook him for sleepy, or even lazy. But Kanan knew that inside, Diaz wasn’t so cool, that under the correct circumstances a seam of temper could ignite. People who underestimated Nico Diaz often made a fatal mistake.

Kanan set his phone and wallet and a cluster of Post-it notes on the desk. Diaz sauntered over.

“What’s all this?”

“My memories. My collection,” Kanan said. “Go through them. Put them in chronological order. Help me organize a plan.”

Diaz leafed through them. Kanan took off his jean jacket and flannel shirt and pulled his T-shirt over his head.

Diaz looked up. He stared. “Boss. Man.”

Kanan’s arms and chest were covered with writing. He raised his left arm and made a fist. The words inked on his skin stood out. Diaz’s expression hardened.

His gaze scrolled up Kanan’s body.
Find Alec. Get Slick.

“Brief me,” Diaz said.

“I went to Africa to get the product. It went wrong. Guy from the company tried to steal it behind our back. But now I’m home, and I don’t have it. And the only way to get it now is from my brother.”

“Boss, this thing . . . Misty, have you—”

“No. Pray she’ll understand why I’m doing this.”

Diaz nodded.

“Alec has access to the last existing sample of Slick. He’ll never give it to me. And if he finds out I’m after it, he’ll destroy it. We have to get to him before he does.”

“Time frame?”

Kanan held up his left arm and made a fist.
Saturday they die.

“Right.” Diaz sorted through the Post-its. “While I organize this stuff, you think you should go back to the hospital?”

Kanan didn’t remember going to any hospital. “No time.”

“Okay. Anybody you’ve told about this?”

“Don’t know.”

Diaz held up the phone. “Names in here? Intel? Targets? Opposition?”

“You have to tell me.”

“Has it been turned on the whole time?”

“I don’t know. Diaz, I can’t remember where I’ve been since I landed at SFO. Double-check that I set the phone on airplane mode, so it won’t transmit or receive.” He ran his hands over his face. He felt damned tired. “If I followed my own procedures, I programmed the phone to activate at a particular hour but not before. It’s the system I set up for Chira-Sayf. That way when execs go overseas nobody can hack their calls or track their location.”

Diaz fiddled with the phone. “It’s scheduled to activate at ten P.M. tonight. You expecting them to call?”

“I guess I must be.”

“Who’s looking for you?”

“Presume everybody. Police, the targets. Chira-Sayf.”

Diaz held up a laminated hospital photo I.D. “Johanna Beckett?”

Kanan gazed at it with curiosity. For an instant he seemed to smell a woman’s perfume, like incense. Seemed to feel his hand around the hilt of a knife.

What the hell was wrong with him?

Diaz scrolled through the cell phone photos. He showed one to Kanan. Shot through the window of a restaurant, it showed the woman in the hospital I.D. photo, sitting at a table with his brother. It was labeled “Doc and Alec.”

“She’s involved,” Kanan said.

“How?”

“I don’t know.” The admission felt like being splashed with paint stripper. “She could be chasing me. I could be chasing her. I don’t know whose side she’s on.”

“But you think she can point you to Alec?”

“I must.”

“And you can’t find Alec at any of his usual haunts?”

“No.”

Diaz paused. “This isn’t payback. You know that, right?”

Kanan didn’t answer that question. “What gear do you have here that we can use?”

“What are you looking for?”

Kanan reached behind his back and removed the HK pistol from the waistband of his jeans.

“What kind of ammo, and how many magazines do you want?” Diaz said.

“How many you got?”

city park. The street was busy with Friday rush-hour traffic. The sun The SFPD patrol car rolled past the elementary school and the little city park. The street was busy with Friday rush-hour traffic. The sun was heading down, headlights coming on. Officer Frank Liu drove halfway past the red Navigator before he noticed it parked at the curb.

At the corner he U-turned and cruised back. He pulled over behind the vehicle.

He checked the BOLO. Be on the lookout for a red, late-model Navigator, stolen that morning. He checked the license plate. Called it in.