Jane Hawk Thriller

7 (#ulink_21f2c0ee-3487-5421-acfc-5b3eacd846b8)

On the freeway high above, headlights drilled the descendent night as traffic rocketed toward Long Beach and points south. Of the surrounding factories and warehouses and storage yards, some were eerily lighted and engaged in seemingly infernal industry, others perhaps abandoned, dark walls bearing spray-painted Day-Glo gang symbols like the runes of an off-planet civilization. The streets were vaguely lighted by lampposts, some having been shot out for sport. As the last sunlight bled from the sky, the only vehicles on the move nearby were large trucks that resembled military transports embarked on a clandestine mission in a world at perpetual war.

Jane’s heart pounded as though she’d just boarded the Explorer after a hundred-yard dash. She had lost people who were dear to her, who were dead because they tried to help her, and their deaths weighed on her more painfully every day. Others were even now at risk, not least of all the people who had taken her son, Travis, into their home in Scottsdale, to hide him there for the duration. She could kill any bloody-minded Arcadian who came at her with murderous intent and suffer no enduring anguish, but the guiltless who died because of her were a stain on her soul. She hoped, perhaps irrationally, that she’d be able to conclude this crusade without inducing other innocents to join the resistance only then to forfeit their lives.

And now here was Vikram.

“What’d you hit me for?”

“I don’t want you dead.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ve got winnitude.”

“‘Winnitude’?”

“Winnitude. I land on my feet like a cat.”

“Like a kitten. Ricky de Soto is a viper. You’re not in his league.”

“Obviously he didn’t kill me.”

“Which is astounding. You just walk in on him, wanting to know did he sell me some off-market wheels—me, the most-wanted fugitive in the country.”

“I knew it was tricky—”

“‘Tricky’?”

“So I didn’t go alone.”

She closed her eyes. “Whatever you’re about to say isn’t going to make it better.”

“There were five of us. My brother. An uncle. Two cousins, including Judy, the one who was driving the Escalade at the library earlier. There’s safety in numbers.”

“There’s no safety in numbers,” Jane disagreed.

“What’s he going to do—kill us all?”

“Yes. Exactly. He’d likely kill you all, have his guys dig a mass grave with a backhoe, dump you in it, cover you up, and go out for a nice lunch.”

“First thing, I explained about the Bureau’s collateral-crimes file, how I’d done him the big favor of deleting him from it.”

“I want to hit you again. Damn it, Vikram, at that moment he realized only you know about him and only you could one day insert him in the file again or tell the FBI about him.”

Massaging his arm where she’d hit him, Vikram thought about what he’d done. After a silence, he said, “I guess it could have gotten ugly at that point.”

“Ugly. Oh, you don’t know ugly.”

“But it didn’t.” He grinned and said, “You know why it didn’t get ugly? Because Enrique is hot for you.”

“That’s not exactly news to me, Vikram. If I didn’t have the widow-in-mourning excuse, I’d have had to pull a gun on Ricky more than once.”

“I explained to him how I could help you if I could find you, how I could almost surely find you if I knew what you were driving. I gave him a demonstration on his computer, how I can backdoor everyone from the FBI to the National Security Agency to Homeland Security. He was mega impressed. He offered me a position with his company.”

“It’s not a company, Vikram. It’s a criminal operation.”

“Anyway, he was excited to think you might survive all this and then you’d owe him and maybe think of him as Sir Gilligan.”

“Who?”

“I realized he meant Galahad, from the knights of the Round Table, but I didn’t think it would be smart to correct him.”

“That’s why you still have a tongue.”

“Anyway,” Vikram said, pointing at the roof again with his right index finger, “the important thing is he believed me. He told me what he’d last sold you and what license plates he put on it.”

Nationwide, most police cruisers and many government vehicles were equipped with 360-degree license-plate-scanning systems that automatically recorded the numbers from all the vehicles around them. They continuously transmitted the data to regional archives but also to the National Security Agency’s million-square-foot data center in Utah.

Three years ago, at the instruction of corrupt officials high in the Department of Justice, Vikram had installed a rootkit in the NSA’s system. This powerful malware program functioned at such a low level that he could swim through their data troves without risk of drawing the attention of IT security sharks.

Although he had delighted in demonstrating his genius—his wicked little babies—to Jane, although he had taught her how to backdoor telecom companies, the Department of Motor Vehicles in any of the fifty states, and numerous other entities, he had carefully avoided exposing her to charges of espionage. He had never shown her how to access the NSA or any other intelligence service.

So after making a new best friend in Enrique de Soto, he had backdoored the NSA to search the archives of license-plate scans for the number that Ricky had provided when he’d sold the Ford Explorer Sport to Jane.

“In the less than two weeks you’ve had the vehicle,” Vikram said, “the plates have been scanned on twelve occasions. Twice in Arizona. Otherwise in various places in Southern California. The most recent was Wednesday, in the San Fernando Valley, on Roscoe Boulevard, by a scanner-equipped car belonging to the Environmental Protection Agency.”

The NSA also retained vast video files from key public-building security cameras and from tens of thousands of traffic cams in major metropolitan areas. Using the date and time—12:09 P.M.—of the EPA automatic recording of the Explorer license plate, Vikram accessed those video archives to review the intersections of Roscoe Boulevard and other streets in the vicinity of the sighting.

“It was Wednesday evening when I was tooling this, using my laptop in a hipster hotel in Santa Monica. I found your Explorer on video in ten minutes and followed it nine blocks to the Counting Sheep, where it seemed you’d taken a room early that afternoon. So then I got in my car and drove there for real, and sure enough your SUV was parked right in front of Room Three. Before you hit me again, consider that if it was the black hats who had that license number, you’d already be in their custody or dead.”

Jane grimaced. “I’m not going to hit you again.”

“But I’ll understand if you do. Totally. Unequivocally. I now understand your point of view. Enrique. Viper. Out of my league.”

“If you were at the motel two nights ago, why didn’t you contact me then?”

“The math was still way bad. High probability that you would’ve shot me on sight, at least to wound.”

“What—your formulas are based on the assumption I’m trigger-happy?”

“No, no, no. But math is math. I went back to my hotel and cooked up my little scenario in about an hour and got my cast together, and it worked out great.”

Although he was thirty, there was a part of Vikram that would be forever an ebullient teenager.

“Sweetie,” Jane said affectionately, to be sure that she had his complete attention, “do you understand how deep the shit is that you’re in now?”

“Up to my chin,” he said with a smile. “But you need help. You need a friend. I am your friend.”

“How do you know I’m not as evil as they claim?”