White Death (30 page)

Casualties of the job, #219: an uninterrupted sex life.

ANDERSSEN,
said the display.

‘Hey, Max.’

‘Gonna send you something. Caught on Unzicker’s e-mail this morning.’

‘OK. I’ll take a look and call you back.’

The message came through thirty seconds later. Unzicker
– e-mail address
[email protected]
– was exchanging messages with an unnamed correspondent –
[email protected].
The thread was entitled simply ‘The Game’.

[email protected]:
Y’all ready to play?

[email protected]:
Hell yeah. They won’t know what’s hit ’em.

[email protected]:
Sure it can’t be traced?

[email protected]:
Sure I’m sure.

[email protected]:
Claim credit for it after?

[email protected]:
We’ll see.

Patrese read it all through twice, and then rang Anderssen back. ‘Where’s he now?’

‘Still in his room.’

‘Any more than this? Any clue as to when he might be planning to, er, play?’

‘I got what you got. Nothing more. Hold on.’ Patrese heard the trill of a cellphone at Anderssen’s end, and then Anderssen’s monosyllabic gruffness as he answered, listened, spoke, hung up, and returned to Patrese’s call. ‘That’s the watchers. He’s on the move.’

‘Where’s he going?’

‘Turned left along the riverbank. Heading upstream. On foot.’

Patrese looked at Inessa in his bed, rumpled and tousled and giving him a look so full of dirty promise that it would
have seduced Truman Capote. The hell with the investigation,
Patrese thought. Anderssen’s men were professionals. Patrese had seen their sort at work, and they were good. They’d be front, back and either side, forming an invisible and elastic box around Unzicker. The watchers would swap places as they moved, but the shape would remain largely the same, and Unzicker would always be in view. They’d tail him wherever he was going, and if he so much as looked like harming someone, they’d nail him. Patrese had been chasing his tail on this thing for three weeks now. He’d had enough. A weekend off would do him good. A weekend in bed with Inessa would do him even better.

‘I’m on my way,’ he said.

Anderssen kept Patrese in touch with Unzicker’s movements as Patrese hared up the freeway. Unzicker was still walking alongside the river: past the Hyatt, past Trader Joe’s, past the famous Shell sign from the thirties, past Riverside Press Park.

After a mile or so, he hung a left on the Western Street Bridge, crossing the Charles River into Allston. There were more people around now: students clad in crimson or blue, tens becoming hundreds becoming thousands as they headed like pilgrims for tailgate parties in the fields and the main event itself, the Harvard–Yale football match.

Or, as those two institutions like to style it with typical modesty, The Game.

Not ‘the game’, Patrese realized when Anderssen told him where Unzicker was: The Game. But was The Game part of the game? After all, if you were killing Ivy League students, where better to search for targets than at the most famous Ivy League match-up of all? There weren’t only a handful of potential targets here: there were thousands.

Kick-off was midday, and there was still an hour or so to go when Patrese arrived. The watchers were clustered invisibly round Unzicker, tracking him as he walked between lines of tailgate parties in the field abutting the stadium. Anderssen was on top of an unmarked van in one corner of the field, watching Unzicker through binoculars. Someone found another pair for Patrese. They watched together in silence.

The tailgate parties are almost more of an event than the game itself. In the unremitting schedule of an Ivy League semester, this was one of the few days when students practically had a license to let their hair down and start drinking from the get-go. Many students hired U-Haul trucks to bring all the beer and barbecue equipment, and then leapt up on to the roofs of the trucks and started dancing. Twelve feet above ground, drunk and often in slippery conditions: it didn’t need, well, a Harvard degree to see that more people were going to end the day with broken bones than had started it. There was probably less chance of injury in the match itself than there was at the tailgate parties.

And through all the smoking grills and merriment and shrieking laughter and beer coolers and bawdy songs, Unzicker walked alone. Some people recognized him from the news coverage and whispered to their companions, but most of the tailgaters were so busy eating and drinking that they wouldn’t have noticed Elvis.

Patrese almost felt sorry for Unzicker, until he saw the look Unzicker was giving those past whom he walked like the angel of death. It wasn’t hatred that Patrese saw in Unzicker’s eyes, because hatred suggested a force, a power. What Patrese saw was an
absence
; a hollow where the spark of life should be. He shivered involuntarily.

With half an hour to go till kick-off, Unzicker went into the stadium. Half Greek arena and half Roman circus, Harvard Stadium is shaped like a horseshoe with a large crimson scoreboard at the open end and the Boston skyline beyond. The stands are numbered 1 through 37, with one to the scoreboard’s immediate left and thirty-seven opposite. Unzicker had a ticket for stand number three, and sat about halfway up the seating bank.

Patrese had once taken down a suicide bomber in Pittsburgh’s Heinz Field, which had been infinitely more demanding than this. Heinz Field seated twice as many people; Patrese hadn’t known for a long time where the bomber was sitting; and he’d been left with no option other than to take a shot knowing that if his aim was off, even by a fraction, the bomber would have detonated his vest and taken out everyone within a ten-yard radius.

Here, it was hard to see at first glance exactly what damage Unzicker could do. It was broad daylight, and he was surrounded by thousands of people. There was no way he could find a victim and spirit him or her away without being seen. Maybe he was here simply to scope out a likely target: see who was too drunk to resist, keep tabs on them till after the game, and then strike when the crowds had dispersed and darkness was falling. If that was the case, the watchers would get him long before he could manage any of that.

They won’t know what’s hit ’em
, Unzicker had e-mailed this morning. Patrese reminded himself not to take chances on this one. They weren’t to take their eyes off Unzicker, not for a second.

Unzicker wouldn’t know who the watchers were, but he sure as hell knew who Patrese and Anderssen were. They couldn’t run the risk of him seeing them, but neither did they want to let him out of their sight, watchers or no watchers. Harvard Stadium was famous for its excellent sightlines, but for Patrese right now that was a drawback. Everywhere he could see Unzicker, Unzicker could see him.

Except one place, Patrese realized: from behind the scoreboard itself.

The scoreboard was mounted on the roof of the Murr Center, the building that housed Harvard’s squash and tennis courts. Patrese and Anderssen flashed their badges at the facilities manager and got him to open the door leading on to the roof.

There was a maintenance gantry at the back of the scoreboard, though nowhere for the operators to sit and no protection from the elements: the board must have been controlled from elsewhere in the stadium. Patrese and Anderssen climbed on to the gantry. If they went to the right-hand side of the scoreboard, away from where Unzicker was sitting, they could watch him without being seen themselves.

The field stretched out ahead of them, end zone to end zone. The stands were filling up: Harvard crimson to their right, Yale blue to their left. This was emphatically not a day for neutrals, Patrese thought: except for one.

He trained his binoculars on Unzicker again. Unzicker was fiddling with what looked like a smartphone, or some other handheld electronic device. Patrese had brief fancies of mind-control rays and mass hallucinations: Unzicker as some sci-fi villain turning the crowd into zombies. Fans crowded to his left and right, front and back, and yet Unzicker managed to maintain around himself a small but definite exclusion zone, as though his weirdness and aloofness had combined to create a forcefield.

A long-forgotten movie scene came to Patrese’ mind: spectators at a tennis match, their heads going back and forth with the ball, and in the middle of them all one man looking straight and unwavering at the man he was later going to kill. Hitchcock, Patrese thought, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember the name of the movie itself.

When the teams came running on to the pitch, Unzicker looked only mildly animated while everyone else around him cheered and whooped. The color guard, the national anthem, all the pre-match rigmarole: Unzicker barely noted any of it, preferring instead to fiddle with his phone. Patrese kept watching, but for the moment his mind was elsewhere, back in his own glory days of college football at Pitt: the razzmatazz, the feeling that he was one of the big men on campus, the human tunnel through which the team would run on to the field while the band played ‘March to Victory’, and then the game itself, the handoffs from the quarterback, the heart-pounding rush into the tunnel of bodies in midfield, ducking, weaving, muscles working faster than thought itself as he jinked toward the glimmering chinks through the darkness, run to daylight, run to daylight, as though the noise from the crowd was physically prising open the gaps in front of him, and then out into the open prairie and the long run for home, defenders floundering in his slipstream as the crowd rose and stamped and his teammates thrust their arms skywards, go Franco, go, go, go.

Nothing else in his life had ever come close.

Patrese forced his mind back to the present. The captains
were shaking hands, the umpires were taking up their positions. The game was about to start.

A ripple in the crowd: surprise, laughter. Patrese saw faces turned toward him, fingers pointing. Instinctively, he ducked backwards, fully behind the gantry, and looked at Anderssen:
What the fuck?
Anderssen shrugged; he had no idea either. The laughter became louder, interspersed with cheers and boos; pantomime stuff, it seemed to Patrese, as though the game itself had been forgotten.

From the speakers on top of the scoreboard, so sudden and loud that Patrese and Anderssen both jumped, came the voice of the public-address announcer.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for the scoreboard malfunction. The game will start just as soon as we get it fixed.’

Patrese stepped out in front of the scoreboard and looked up at it. He was so close that it took him a moment or two to read the whole of the display:
HARVARD ARE A BUNCH OF HORSES’ ASSES
.
Cheers from the Yale fans; boos from the Harvard ones. As Patrese watched, the text faded into another sentence:
YALE SUCK HARDER THAN LINDA LOVELACE
.
Standing in the middle, Patrese got a weird Doppler effect as the boos and cheers switched sides.

Patrese looked at Unzicker again, and this time there was a discernible expression on Unzicker’s face: one of ineffable satisfaction at his own cleverness.

Patrese would have thought that after his last experience in the custody of the Cambridge police, Unzicker wouldn’t have been too keen for another dose. Not a bit of it. He could hardly wait to tell Patrese how he’d done it. The object he’d been fiddling with, the one Patrese had taken for a smartphone, was a portable hacking device that conducted penetration tests of wireless networks and allowed Unzicker to override the ones without sufficient protection. Unzicker had discovered during another Harvard game that getting into the scoreboard system was child’s play, and had therefore planned to override it not in some no-mark match-up, but during the biggest game of the year. The e-mails they’d seen that morning were to one of his colleagues in the Stata Center, who was also in on the joke.

Patrese remembered Unzicker’s history of pranks – distorting the lecturer’s voice, changing the elevator announcements, the spoof Disney buyout. Pranking – ‘hacking’ – was an MIT thing, Unzicker said, and never more appreciated than when used against Harvard. MIT students still spoke in awe of the guys who’d hidden a weather balloon under the Harvard field and inflated it during the match until it had exploded and sprayed talcum powder on the field. This hack, Unzicker assured them, would take an equally revered place in history.

Harvard said they didn’t wish to press charges; doing so would make them look petty and humorless, exactly the qualities Unzicker had been lampooning to start with, and they didn’t want to make his point for him. For the second time in a few days, Unzicker was released without charge, though not without rancor: Anderssen’s, mainly, rather than Patrese’s.

‘He’s made a fool of us,’ Anderssen snapped. ‘And just because he’s an asshole practical joker doesn’t mean he’s not a killer too. Weirdo like that, who knows what he’s thinking or doing?’

‘And now he knows we’re following him,’ Patrese replied.

‘Then let’s use it. Let’s make the surveillance overt. Get in his face, unsettle him, make him do something dumb.’

‘And jeopardize our chances of catching Kwasi?’

‘That’s your call. My job is to catch the asshole doing these things in my town. Anyway, who’s to say it will jeopardize them? Might have the opposite effect. No disrespect, Franco, but sitting around waiting for things to happen hasn’t exactly worked out too well so far, has it? Come on. We’re the law. Let’s start acting like it. Let’s take control. Let’s make these fuckers dance to our tune for a change.’

Patrese found a quiet corner of a café and tried to clear his mind.