The Memory Collector (44 page)

He unzipped his backpack and saw the battery. He checked the truck. Behind the seats he had an armory. God bless Nikita Khrushchev and all bobblehead messiahs.

A vibration in his pocket startled him. His phone had just gone active.

That had to mean he was on some kind of countdown. The watch-band setting might mean he was due to go to an appointment.

He took the phone from his pocket expectantly. Then he saw the display. “Shit.”

Riva Calder
.

She was the last person he wanted to talk to. Dealing with her at work was enough of a strain. During a crisis, especially one he didn’t understand—no way.

The phone vibrated again. He hesitated.

Why would she be calling him so late in the evening? Even Riva never phoned him at ten P.M. She was too smart for that. She couldn’t hide the crazy lust she harbored for him, but she knew that calling him late on a Friday night would be self-defeating.

Except she was doing it. He didn’t get it—but he didn’t get Riva. A successful, bright, driven woman, she had a thing for him like an abscess, some wound that went deep and dirty. Some lesion that she liked to dig at, like popping stitches before they could ever heal. She was lucky Misty hadn’t taken a baseball bat to her head years back. But Riva never called him after hours on his cell. She knew he wouldn’t answer.

Unless something was wrong. He answered. “Riva?”

“Ian, thank God. I’ve been trying to get you for hours.”

Her voice came out in a rush, like she’d been running. “Your house was broken into. Misty and Seth are missing.”

A thought brushed past his mind, thin as smoke. A woman was involved with the kidnapping . . . it was just the shadow of something that had been snatched and stolen. And like that, the thought swirled away again.

“I know. I’m going to get them back,” he said.

“Ian, oh, Christ—we’re running out of time.”

“What do you mean?”

“The kidnappers couldn’t reach you. Have you had your phone off?”

“Who did they contact?” he said.

“Chira-Sayf. They tried to get Alec and when they couldn’t, they sent a crazy message through the switchboard. Security called me.”

He sat up straighter. “What message?”

“Meet them at ten fifteen.”

“Where?”

“San Jose. Half a mile north of eight-eighty on Coleman Avenue, west of the airport.”

“Did they say anything about my family?”

“‘The Kanans will be arriving home from their trip. Pick them up there. And bring the luggage.’ Ian, did they mean a ransom?”

“Wait.” He grabbed a Sharpie. On the back of his left hand, in big letters, he scrawled,
10:15 p.m. SJC. GO.
He dropped the pen in the center console. “On my way.”

“Ian, what’s—”

He hung up, dropped the phone on the passenger seat, and jammed
Coleman Avenue
into the GPS. A smooth female voice filled the car, sounding as if she had all the time in the world.

“In one hundred yards, turn right.”

A route appeared on the screen, an arrow leading him to his family. He put the truck in gear.

Jo sat behind the wheel of the idling Tahoe, parked in an empty office parking lot just off the 101 in San Jose. Through the windshield she saw Calder hang up her phone. Calder ran across the parking lot and jumped back in the Tahoe.

She put the SUV in drive for Jo. “Go.”

Calder’s cheeks were flushed, her pupils dilated. She looked like she’d just gotten a jolt of sugar. From watching the woman on the phone, and seeing her rub the dolphin necklace, Jo guessed she’d been talking to the intoxicant called Ian Kanan.

Jo pulled back onto the freeway and continued south through San Jose. She couldn’t honk, couldn’t put down the window and yell at other drivers. She could speed or wreck the Tahoe but knew that if she started swerving, Murdock would turn somebody’s face into an exit wound. She stayed in her lane and drove at the speed limit, rolling toward the San Jose airport under the yellow glow of sodium streetlights. In the far back of the SUV, fixed under the barrel of Vance’s pistol, Seth and Misty held still.

Two minutes later, Jo saw the airport. The perimeter fence practically abutted the freeway. The end of a runway lay just on the other side of it. Despite everything, she felt a burst of optimism. Heading to the airport had to mean Riva was planning a getaway. And an airport was as stupid a place to kill hostages as Jo could conceive of.

“Take the exit,” Murdock said.

With her wrists cuffed to the steering wheel she couldn’t signal. Calder hit the blinker.

Heart drumming, she pulled off the freeway. In the distance she could see the airport terminals, the control tower, and a jet rolling down the runway. She prepared to turn right.

“Go left,” Calder said.

Jo looked at her sharply. “What? Where are we going?”

“Drive.”

Instead of turning toward the terminals, they went south on Airport Boulevard, around the perimeter fence at the south end of the runways. They passed bristling electronic masts. On her right, a chain-link fence offered glimpses of the tarmac. The runways were black gashes brightened with Christmas-tree lighting. Jo drove past a long, gleaming jet blast deflector. A 737 screamed overhead, lights glaring, engines at high pitch, and touched down.

Ahead, on the far side of the airfield, the private aviation terminals were brightly lit. A phalanx of corporate jets and charter aircraft gleamed under brilliant hangar lights.

Riva made a phone call. “We’ll be there in ten minutes. Be ready to go.”

This was not good. This was, in fact, very bad.

Kanan slowed the pickup and swung around the off-ramp. He scanned the road ahead and turned onto Coleman Avenue, west of the airport. Mineta San Jose International Airport—
International
meant that plenty of airliners lifted off from there and winged away to Mexico, South America, Canada, as well as the U.S. Midwest and East Coast.

He could see over the perimeter fence and across the runways. Jets were lined up at the commercial terminals, hooked to Jetways and fuel hoses like piglets suckling at the teats of a sow. The airfield was a dark expanse between the airliners on the east side of the airport and the private terminals on the west. The runway and taxiway lights shone vividly. Red, yellow, green. He saw them with prism clarity, so clearly that he thought he could pinpoint their exact frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum.

The thing in his head, the memory eater, was bizarre. It was chopping out most of his world, scooping away his experiences like a combine, collecting all information before he could store it as memory. But this thing wasn’t only about recall. It wasn’t simply collecting. It was firing inside his head. He felt, when he slowed his breathing and concentrated, that he’d been rewired. He felt like his brain went to eleven.

He could use that to get his family back.

The voice of the GPS purred at him. “You have reached your destination.”

She had no idea.

“Keep it slow,” Calder said.

At ten fifteen on a Friday night, Coleman Avenue was quiet. It was a major road, but the business parks and warehouses along the road were dark, chilly, and empty. To the west were railroad tracks and, beyond them, Santa Clara University. All the activity was east, beyond a block of industrial parks and aviation businesses, at the airport.

“Turn right,” Calder said.

Jo turned from Coleman onto a side road and headed through a business park toward the airfield. The buildings, the ubiquitous white concrete and blue glass architecture of Silicon Valley, were shut for the weekend. The road ran east for eighty yards, made a left turn, and ran north-south between Coleman and the airport runways. It was absolutely deserted. Jo passed more bristling microwave and radar towers and the entrance to the airport traffic control center.

“Slow down,” Calder said.

Jo slowed the Tahoe to a crawl. At a corner, Calder held up her hand.

“Stop. Pull over.”

Jo pulled to the curb. On the lawn of an office complex, eucalyptus and pines stood cold in the night. To her left, the cross road offered a clear view back toward Coleman. She could see streetlights and, very occasionally, a passing car.

To her right, the cross road narrowed to an access drive. It ended after seventy yards at a gate with a swing arm. Beyond were the private aviation terminals.

There was no guard at the gate, only a card-reading machine and a one-by-four piece of plywood painted black and white. Jo reminded herself yet again that airport security was a game. It was played to placate the flying public and keep security personnel employed and feeding their massive authority complex.

In the sky above, the landing lights of an airliner blared and turbines whined. A jet crossed the runway threshold, flared, and touched down. As it streaked past its thrust reversers howled.

On the airfield apron, parked at varying angles, tail in, tail out, edge on—like a flock of gulls that had circled and landed all askew—were white corporate jets. They were mostly locked up, windows dark. But one jet wasn’t tucked in for the night. It was large, with a T-tail and two engines at the back. The door was open and the stairs were down. Inside the lights were aglow. She saw a man walk up the aisle, pass the door, and go into the cockpit.

She wondered if the same crew that had flown Alec Shepard in from Montreal that morning was prepping Chira-Sayf’s jet for its flight tonight.

Riva planned to get Slick from Ian Kanan and then fly away. And the only way she could get Slick was by showing Kanan that his wife and son were alive. Jo clutched tight to that thought.

But why exchange them here, instead of at the Valley Fair Mall ten minutes down the freeway? Did Riva plan to put Jo and the Kanans on the plane and fly them someplace where they’d never be seen again—such as the Pacific Ocean?

But that would never work. The pilot would never agree to it. The idea was crazy.

Crazy, however, seemed to be Riva Calder’s business plan.

“Cut the lights,” Calder said.

Jo looked at her. “How?”

Chagrined, Calder reached over and turned off the Tahoe’s headlights. Jo sat, hands growing numb from the plastic handcuffs, and watched the pilots moving around inside Chira-Sayf’s corporate jet.

Next to her, Calder shifted and her energy swelled. She was looking past Jo out the driver’s window, back toward Coleman Avenue.

A truck was stopped at the curb there, lights blazing.

“That’s him,” Calder said.

She opened the door and got out. Leaned back in and looked into the back seat. “I’ll call you with instructions.”

Murdock leaned forward. “Give me your field pass.”

“I’ll bring it back.”

She shut the door and jogged across the street. Keeping to the shadows, she headed for the distant truck.