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“Wrong answer,” I said. “I saw the morgue order.”

  “You were duped.”

  I scowled. That was possible. Blake hadn’t discovered the whereabouts of her body. The airline had no record of a coffin. If Kay’s corpse hadn’t gone to Geneva, where had it gone and who had taken it? My scowl deepened. I wasn’t going to figure that out now. I need to stick with the priorities.

  “Why are you hunting Harris?” I asked.

  “It is no concern of yours.”

  I saw the two assassins then, the killers with the PDWs. They peered around a corner of Neil’s Grill. I had no doubt the other sniper commandos would be trying to work over here soon.

  I heard Harleys starting up. The Chief must have moved. Why had he exposed himself like that in the first place by coming here?

  “What are you really after?” I asked.

  “My goals remain the same: the safety of the human race. Surrender, Herr Kiel, or run far away from here, to place where I will never hear about you again.”

  I swore softly under my breath. The two assassins sprinted for my building. I wasn’t ready to take on the Shop head to head. So I crushed the microphone and ripped out the earpiece. “No hard feelings,” I told the man I was kneeling on.

  The commando tried to squirm free. Maybe he thought I was going to kill him. Instead, I hit him hard, knocking him out. It was time to leave. I’d let the Chief worry about clearing up the dead commando. He’d want to keep the State Department out of it, so I’m sure he wouldn’t advertise the presence of armed Shop commandos working on American soil.

  Now I realized why Harris had been so eager to leave.

  -15-

  I took a chance and returned to the Alamo. Blake was grumpy when I shook him awake in the guest bunk. The little clock on the shelf with its red numbers said 2:44 A.M.

  “Sit up,” I told him. “Pinch yourself. I don’t want you to forget what I’m telling you.”

  “Huh?”

  I gave him an edited rundown on Harris and the Chief. I left out a lot, even though I knew Blake would have loved Harris’s vampire theories. I’d tell him about them later.

  “They actually shot at you?” Blake asked. “That’s serious.”

  I laughed dryly. Everything about the Shop was serious. “I need you to do some footwork for me,” I said.

  Blake nodded sleepily.

  “I’m going to be looking over my shoulder even more than before,” I said. “It will slow me down. So I want you to speak with the paramedics who picked up Kay.”

  “What if the Shop picks me up?”

  “Tell them everything you know and say that I hounded you into this.”

  “Great,” Blake said.

  “They’re not looking for you. It’s me they want, and Harris.”

  “Maybe they want the cube more than they want you.”

  “Do you have some new ideas on what it does? Do you think it could be an anti-matter bomb?”

  “Let’s hope no one was that crazy,” Blake said. “Otherwise, detonating it now would make people nostalgic for the quake of 1906.

  He meant the legendary earthquake that had shattered San Francisco at the start of the Twentieth Century. At the back of every San Franciscan’s mind was the knowledge that someday another quake of that magnitude would occur. At least, that’s what the seismologists said. Blake had carefully explained to me before how precisely laid nuclear bombs on the ocean’s floor could duplicate the feat. I knew that anti-matter bombs—when scientists were finally able to construct them—would make nukes look like firecrackers. Man had a wonderful ability to create destructive technological marvels. For a moment, at least, I could sympathize with the Chief’s goal—if that truly was his goal.

  “No,” Blake was saying, “anti-matter strikes me as too improbable. I couldn’t see Kay able to just walk away with a world-ending device.”

  “We know it’s a weapon. Cheng said it would prove useful against Dave.”

  “That doesn’t mean it has to be an anti-matter bomb. Maybe it’s a pulse bomb, as in EMP pulse that would destroy all electronics within—I don’t know, a fifty mile radius.” Blake gave me a sickly grin. “Maybe throwing it in the ocean was the best thing you could have done.”

  “Not for Kay.”

  “It wasn’t your fault they killed her.”

  “That doesn’t matter now,” I said. “I’m staying away from the Alamo for a while. If you want to go home, I’ll understand. People are dying, and before this is done, more will die.”

  “I’m staying,” he said.

  “Then be careful and don’t take any chances.”

  ***

  I went to a Hotel 6, paid with cash, entered my room, kicked off my shoes and lay on the bed in the dark.

  I’d been thinking. The Shop had worldwide tentacles and dozens of ways to pressure anyone they wanted. If anything paralleled the fanciful Illuminati of popular conspiracy theories, it was the Shop. Yet with such a hidden and powerful agency, it had many cross-purposes. It had many powerful people in the organization with their own spheres of interest and authority. It wasn’t monolithic because any group that had so many different people couldn’t be one in mind. Humans weren’t ants, but combative, argumentative and envy-ridden individuals. Likely, there were those in the Shop who approved of what Polarity Magnetics did. Therefore, it must be more than the U.S. State Department pressuring them that kept the Chief leashed.

  The Chief had tried to take out Harris, just as commandos had tried to take me out on three separate occasions in the last four years. It appeared that neither the Chief nor anyone else in the Shop had made such attempts on Doctor Cheng or against Polarity Magnetics—except for Kay.

  In San Francisco, the Chief had told me he was running an investigation. Other than trying to kill Harris, did that mean the Chief hunted for dirt to use against Polarity Magnetics? He obviously disliked what they did, or his faction in the Shop didn’t like the direction Polarity Magnetics had taken.

  Why might the Chief order Kay killed? There could be a number of reasons. He might have found out that she’d cheated him at the Reservation. She had let me escape. That might be enough. Maybe she had told Polarity Magnetics too many things about the Reservation. Maybe Kay had become the Shop’s inside person in Polarity Magnetics, and then Kay had tried to double-cross the Chief.

  Why would Doctor Cheng kill Kay? Why would Stone or Harris?

  I had it narrowed down to the Chief, Cheng, Stone and Harris. Harris was the wild card right now. What did he really want?

  The Chief had the armored car, but it was a Cadillac, not a Mercedes Benz. Could Ortega have been wrong about the model? I doubted that. He was a mechanic.

  Sometime while ruminating on these puzzles, I fell asleep.

  ***

  I showered in the morning, ate a croissant and an apple, brushed my teeth and locked the door. I passed an arguing husband and wife, with two silent daughters in tow. The husband wanted to go to Disneyland. The wife wished to travel down to San Diego to Sea World.

  I jumped into the cigarette-smelling Ford, drove into the city and parked on Heckendorf Avenue. Then I walked two blocks to Mission Laundry. It was an old square building and took up half the block.

  There was a garage in back and seven parked laundry vans. The eighth van was in the garage, the hood up with a mechanic wrenching on the engine. A radio played mariachi music, much too upbeat for me this early in the morning.

  “Excuse me,” I said, with my hands on the van.

  A stout Hispanic mechanic pulled his head out. He wore a backward Dodgers hat, had an automatic grin and a silver tooth.

  “Do you know where I can find Dan Lee?” I asked.

  “Good morning,” he said in horribly accented English.

  “Dan Lee?” I asked.

  He shrugged good-naturedly.

  “He’s a driver,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know where Dan is?”

  The mechanic shrugged
again, and I began to suspect he didn’t know much English.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll ask up front.”

  “Yes,” he said again. As I turned to go, he went back to working on the engine.

  I walked around to the front on Samson Street, pulled open a glass door and immediately felt the heat. There was a counter and behind it was a curtain of heavy plastic strips that dangled from the ceiling to the floor. They reminded me of the ribbons in a carwash that thumped against your sides and windows as your vehicle rode the conveyer. Heavy binders lay on the counter and a chrome school-matron’s bell.

  I dinged it. A few seconds later, a Chinese woman walked through the hanging plastic and to the counter.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  She was in her twenties, pretty in a fragile way, with long blond-dyed hair.

  “I’m looking for Dan Lee,” I said.

  “That’s my brother.”

  “Ah. Do you know where he is?”

  “Is he in trouble again?” she asked in a tired voice.

  “No. I’m from the insurance company—”

  “They’ve already talked to him,” she snapped.

  “Right. I had a few follow up questions.”

  She gave me a careful scrutiny. “Why do you really want to talk to my brother?”

  I wondered where this girl had picked up her street savvy. “You can handle the truth?”

  “Please,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “I’m a friend of the woman he hit.”

  “It was an accident.” She said that part very fast. She was worried now and it made her seem younger and vulnerable.

  “I’m well aware of that,” I said.

  “So why are you hounding my brother? He feels terrible about it. Do you want him to start using—” The fragile-looking Chinese girl scowled. “What did you say your name was?”

  Something about her manner reminded me of my brother the heroin addict. Ex-addict I should say. I’d had a normal life before I joined the Green Berets, before the accident. My brother was long dead because of AIDS transmitted through a dirty needle. She reminded me of me dealing with my brother…about a lifetime ago.

  “I think the woman was murdered,” I said. “Not by your brother,” I said quickly, holding up my hands.

  “Dan is the one who killed her.”

  “His truck was the weapon used, yes. But who threw her into traffic?”

  “Why did you think she was shoved?” the girl asked.

  “Like I said, she was my friend. Her name was Kay Durant, by the way.”

  “I read the newspaper.”

  “Sure,” I said, nodding. “I knew Kay well. She wasn’t the type to leap into traffic.”

  The Chinese girl nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “That would make my brother feel a whole lot better if he knew it wasn’t his fault.” She gave me a startled look. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound callous. It’s just that this accident has been eating away at Dan.”

  “My brother was a heroin addict,” I said.

  She stared at me. Her eyes finally narrowed and then she abruptly nodded. “I see. You know Dan has a drug problem.”

  “From your reactions I do,” I said.

  “You’re pretty slick, aren’t you?”

  “No more than you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

  “You knew I wasn’t with the insurance company. You knew something was up.”

  She tapped the bottom of her class ring against the counter. “You know where 732 Lander Avenue is?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  She gave me directions. “It’s a bad place. Dan probably ran there. He has some friends that might give you trouble.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  She gave me another scrutiny. “Tell him I’m going to kick his butt if he doesn’t get home soon. I’ll kick it right up between his ears.”

  “Got it,” I said. “And thanks.”

  She thrust out her narrow hand, and as gingerly as possible, I shook hands with her.

  ***

  The sister might have been more accurate and said disgusting place, which meant it was a junkie’s paradise. There were normal older homes around it, the kind built in the Sixties, the ones inhabited by white-haired folk too stubborn or poor for urban flight. The trees were huge and ancient, putting everything into shade. Old ornaments hung from some eves, and a weathervane listlessly inched one way or another. Some houses had birdhouses, birdbaths and perfectly mowed lawns, the edges razor-sharp neat. Once, this had been a model community. Now it was a type of old folk’s home, and if you were nostalgic, you could almost smell an old muscular America in its heyday. Somewhere over the years, it had gone to seed.

  The apartment complex smack in the middle of Middle America was rundown, with boarded windows and a sagging roof ready to collapse. A tremor could knock it down. Soon, bulldozers would do it and they would make a park from the remains or someone with more money than sense would make another apartment complex.

  Moths fly to a flame and junkies slink to places like this. No doubt, some dealer had set up headquarters here. I could well imagine the moldy mattresses and the syphilitic sex that occurred on them.

  I parked and headed around back. I picked my way over old boards and avoided barely stepping on a rusty nail. I pushed the back door and it squealed its way open.

  That should have brought somebody to investigate. I entered a dingy, empty room that smelled of despair and defeat. I listened. Not even a rat scurried.

  I began to explore and soon followed the inevitable zone of urine stench. I found needles galore, baggies, beer cans and other unmentionables. Why would Dan Lee come here when he could go to a clean home?

  Heroin, meth, black crystal, it was all versions of the same useless escape from reality.

  Blake had told me once about his high school government class. He was supposed to come up with a utopia. As a young intellectual, he had felt utopias were impossible. Each person wants something different. So how could a group of people all live in a perfect paradise? Then it had hit him, and he’d typed at night blueprinting a utopia. What it had amounted to was something like this: Machines and robots taught the babies until fifteen or sixteen years of age, force-feeding them all the knowledge they could. Then, the robots wired the human to a dream machine. He or she could live any fantasy their minds could conjure and thus each person lived in his own utopia, with no one to spoil it for them. Their bodies vegetated while their minds roamed free. Instead of an A, the teacher had given Blake a C. She’d scrawled something like—I can’t believe you have such a dim view of humanity. I think you were just trying to avoid doing work.

  Whenever he told the story, Blake would scowl and belittle the teacher, calling her a propagandist and—

  Maybe I’ll just leave it at that. Blake had some strong opinions on such subjects. My point is that we don’t need dream machines. We have drugs, and they’re as cruel as Blake’s utopian future.

  I found Dan Lee upstairs, stretched out on a dirty mattress. There was a needle beside him and tracks on his arm. That didn’t interest me so much as the ugly angle of his neck. It was broken. His mouth was open and his protruding tongue was already black. Someone strong had killed him, someone so strong he or she had left marks on the face where the fingers had pressed too hard.

  I drew my Browning and listened. I couldn’t hear anyone. Slowly, I moved around, checking for signs. Whoever had been here was gone now.

  I crouched beside Dan Lee then as my rage began to gather. I’d spoken with his sister. She had told me where to find him. She would assume I’d killed him. She’d tell the police about it. But that wasn’t the worst of it. A relatively innocent man had lost his life, as pathetic as it had been. While kneeling here beside him I was certain that the person who had killed Kay had also killed Dan Lee so Lee couldn’t tell anyone what he’d seen the night Kay died.

  -16-

  “You’r
e missing an obvious point,” Blake said.

  We sat in The Nut Tree on Park Street in a darkened lounge, the only ones present there. Every other table had overturned glasses, with the chairs tilted against the rounded edges. We heard the clatter of plates in the kitchen and a baby crying in the open dining area. We’d used the crying as an excuse to move here.

  Blake crunched croutons, popping them into his mouth one at a time. On general principle, he hated salads. “I’m not a rabbit,” he’d tell waitresses, “I’m a wolf.” If the soup or the salad came with the meal anyway, he’d tell them to bring him a plate of croutons.

  I pushed my empty bowl of onion soup to the side.

  I’d gone over the dingy junkie’s den, searching for something incriminating and finding three bags of heroin in a niche in the wall. I’d flushed the heroin down the only working toilet. I’d wanted incriminating evidence of his killer, not his sellers. I’d waited for police to show as I’d watched the house from inside my car. After two hours of boredom, I’d concluded it had not been a clever attempt to set me up. Whoever had killed Dan Lee probably had not known I would be following. What did that tell me?

  Negative clues were often the hardest to read correctly.

  “You see,” Blake said as he chomped another crouton, “the police already questioned Dan Lee. I remember an officer telling me that.”

  “Yes?”

  “So why would person X break Dan Lee’s neck? The police already had his statements on file. That means X broke his neck…why?”

  “Maybe the police hadn’t asked the right question. Maybe Kay’s killer knew that if Dan Lee spoke about one particular thing he’d seen that night, it would give the killer away.”

  “Okay,” Blake said slowly.

  After leaving Dan Lee’s corpse, I’d hurried to the marina and approached my boat. Nothing had seemed amiss. At 12:22, I’d given Blake a call. We practiced caution with our cells, only turning them on at prearranged times. From my years with the Shop, I knew they had equipment that would have made the NSA eavesdropping snoops sick with jealousy. The Shop had technicians who could pinpoint hot cells without the person having to make a call. So our cells stayed off except for a different minute each hour. Even that, in my opinion, was cutting it too fine.