Night Talk (29 page)

“Yes. Ethan loved hiding his trail. He was super-inventive about it. I'm sure Mond has by now connected me with you, but I don't think he's found a direct link between me and Ethan, despite our phone calls and text messages. Ethan would have covered our tracks.”

“Okay, so your plan is to hand me over to the Aarons and what? Will they hypnotize me to find the file in my subconscious? Get me on a psychoanalysis couch so Inez Kaufman can unleash my repressed memories?”

“Stop it! Please. I know what you're going through, I'm here with you. My point is that we don't have any other choices. I'm pretty sure Ethan got into the file or he'd still be alive. He said he gave it to you. The Aarons can tackle every possible way that Ethan could have done it. Even that phone call. The file might be sitting right now in your e-mail account, an invisible file that you would never find. But Mond's people will ultimately find it if we can't get the Aarons to jump in and help.”

He was getting tight jaws but her argument made sense. Even he was now convinced Ethan had given him the file. And getting it to Greg so the file would be invisible to prying eyes was how Ethan most likely would have done it.

Ali said, “You haven't told me yet what your plan is when we wake up tomorrow morning and Bob shows us the door—if he even lets us in tonight. We can't keep shuffling around to whoever your friend Franklin can find. We've made zero progress towards finding the file. What are we going to do if we can't find it? I think we're in a holding pattern, waiting to run out of fuel and crash. Going to jail or your black-ops hotel isn't something I want to experience. At least the Aarons might get us to a country where we wouldn't be extradited because they hate Americans.”

“Sure, and they'll probably support us for the rest of our lives in the style we've grown accustomed to. One look at Big Soda Cup Aaron didn't give me confidence in turning my life over to him.”

“Don't let the wrapping one-one-one-oh-one came in fool you. If he and the other Aarons were capable of giving Ethan a hand, they're major-league hackers.”

Greg shook his head, trying to get all the pieces to work. “Look, I don't disagree with you. Finding the file is the only way out. And the best bet would be with the Aarons because they have the know-how. But I'm not ready for that yet. You keep reminding me that Ethan said he gave the file to me. So maybe you're right, maybe I'll get a sudden revelation and the answer to where Ethan hid it will explode in my brain. Besides, we don't know how to contact the Aarons.”

“Inez Kaufman can put us into contact with them,” Ali said.

“Let me think about it,” he said. “Sleep on it.”

More likely he would lie awake, staring up at the ceiling, wondering why the boogie man had come back into his life.

 

54

They did a drive-by of Bob's house. It was the last house on a quiet street at the back end of a residential area. The backyard ended at arid, rocky terrain with stunted trees and bushes—the beginning of the San Gabriel foothills. There was no house directly across the street; the closest one was to the right on the same side as Bob's. Bare windows and an overgrown front yard gave the neighboring house an abandoned appearance.

“Good place to drop under the radar,” Greg said. “If nothing else, it doesn't look like a neighborhood where there would be many surveillance cameras.”

Ali pointed up to the heavens with her forefinger. “Nothing's beyond their reach.”

A white Ford F350 pickup with a camper shell was parked on Bob's concrete driveway. Dents, scrapes and faded paint showed the truck and camper were well traveled.

“The camper makes him independent,” Greg said. “He can stock it with basics, maybe beans and flour and peanut butter, and head into the wilderness for months without having to venture back into civilization. Franklin probably has an emergency food supply ready to grab and go.”

She gave him a look. “Wilderness survival something else you learned on talk radio? Do you have a grab-and-go, too?”

“I'll take the Fifth on that question because I won't win with you no matter how I answer it.”

They parked the car two blocks away and walked back, not meeting anyone on the street or seeing a passing car. From what they saw through windows as they walked, most people were bellied up to the dinner table.

The house was a one-story, weathered ranch with vinyl siding, a composition roof and gabled louvers at each end. The other houses in the neighborhood were chips off the same block, comprising a low-end housing development built several decades earlier on what was cheap land. They were now fighting off dry rot after being toasted by Southern California sunshine and scorching Santa Ana winds. As with the camper, the shine was gone from the homes.

Bob's house had iron bars on the windows, as did a couple other houses they passed on the street, a feature probably motivated by the fact there was a middle school down the street.

The windows were dark but a little glow around the edge of a drape at the front window hinted there was a light on in the living room.

“Call me Bob,” he told them when he answered the door. Greg wondered if that was really his name.

Raw-boned, tall, broad-shouldered, with a beer belly folded over his belt, he had brown hair streaked with gray down to his shoulders, a full beard that was white at the tip, coffee-colored, thick-rimmed old-fashioned glasses, tan wash pants that had been used while painting, a wrinkled, faded, dark green long-sleeve shirt, black running shoes and a purple and gold Lakers' cap. The hat, shoes and other clothes, like the truck, were well traveled.

Greg didn't know if the beard helped keep Bob under the radar. While beards tended to stand out because they were not as common as clean-shaven, the beard could be reduced to a mustache or to no facial hair to quickly change looks. The same for the long hair, which could go to a buzz cut in seconds.

He wondered if the thick-framed glasses were also for a quick change.

“I know who you are, listen to your show,” he told Greg. “Even been on. More than once, but I never talk about the same thing twice. That way I don't leave tracks.”

“What name did you use on the show?”

“Used different names.”

“Right now I could use a different one,” Greg said.

“Franklin said you needed shelter. Didn't tell me why, I don't want to know. Loose lips sink ships.”

A man of few words and tight lips.

The living room was furnished basic—stuffed couch, dark colored to hide the wear and tear, stuffed recliner, coffee table, lamps on tables on each end of the couch. The only personal touches were a portable TV that looked like a boom box and a laptop that sat on the coffee table along with a bottle of beer, a tall Styrofoam soda pop cup, a crunched KFC box, a jar of peanut butter and saltine crackers.

It struck Greg that the house was a furnished rental and that Bob had moved in with just a few items, ready to leave on a moment's notice. Even the camper truck had been backed into the driveway, ready to head out.

Bob noticed Ali eyeing the living room décor. The couch had a sleeping bag thrown on it. Greg took that to be Bob's bedding, period.

“I'm a floater,” Bob said, “carried by the current and the wind wherever it takes me. Whenever I want to go. Tried settling down, but I realized that they always have a camera on you even on the street and on the job. I finally packed up and started drifting when I realized that I was being filmed and recorded by feds through light fixtures and wall plugs.”

“Do you believe they're watching everyone?” Ali asked.

“Not yet, just the ones who have let it be known that they're on to their game. But it will come to that. That's where it's headed for sure. When I was a kid, no one was keeping twenty-four/seven tabs on you, but as electronic surveillance gadgets got as tiny as pinpoints and able to pick up sounds through walls, it became obvious to some of us that somebody”—he eyed them—“or something was picking up information about us.”

“How did you discover it? What tipped you off that you were being kept under scrutiny?” Ali asked.

To Greg she sounded like a prosecutor cross-examining a witness—curious, but doubtful.

“Small things at first. At work personal stuff about me was being discussed that had never left my house. At first I took it to be coincidences. Thought I was just being overly paranoid. But I moved on to another job and pretty soon it became obvious that things that happened behind closed doors were deliberately being revealed to harass me and keep me off balance. And it all started after asking questions about what was going on around me.”

He gestured at the sleeping bag and portable TV.

“It isn't a life for everyone. If you're lonely, you sure as hell will be a lot lonelier if you keep on trucking from one place to another, but it's my way of keeping them off balance. You have to be a minimalist to live like I do, but I pack a lot of baggage compared to the true minimalists.”

“Who are the true minimalists?” Ali asked.

“The homeless and the dead.”

They followed him down a short hallway that had a bedroom on each side and a bathroom at the end. He led them into the bedroom on the left. The bed had a bare double mattress covered by a sleeping bag that was unzipped and spread out.

“Not much I can offer you in terms of creature comfort, but it shouldn't be too cool tonight.”

“Are we taking your bed?” Ali asked.

“Nah, I sleep out in the camper most of the time. If I'm not here in the morning, it's because I got carried away by the current. You won't find anything to eat in the kitchen, but there are fast food joints down toward the freeway.”

He left them alone, closing the door behind him.

Ali shook her head and whispered, “Very strange.”

Greg said, “There have always been people like him, totally divorced from society. Living in remote areas, mountains and deserts with no one else for miles, few amenities, no TV or Internet or social media. Probably no family or friends. He just has a set of wheels under him and keeps on rolling.”

“Floating, he's swept along with the current. Franklin didn't give any clue as to why Bob's on the run?”

“He may just be fleeing the thing that many of us fear—authority. The overwhelming amount and abuse of it by our government. And a feeling of the inevitable, that someday what he fears is going to come pounding at his door in the middle of the night.”

Greg had just described his own fears. “Feeling like a stranger in a strange land?” he asked.

“I feel like I'm in an America that I didn't even know existed. I knew about the domestic spying, that Big Brother is always looking over your shoulder and we have to fight it, but I didn't realize so many people were so totally alienated from our society. You read about survivalists whose houses are like fortresses in the wilderness, but Franklin and Bob are not worried about the apocalypse. They're hiding from the mind-boggling scrutiny that all of us are subjected to. I didn't realize that we're just bugs under a microscope.”

“Science is advancing faster than our minds and hearts can handle,” Greg said. “We're creating things that invade our privacy to the point that there's no place outside our homes where we're not being observed and it's only going to get worse. Robots are already stronger and faster and can beat the greatest chess players—what's going to happen when they can outsmart us about everything else?”

“I'm getting a headache just thinking about what a mess my life and the world is in.” Ali moved aside a drape enough to check out the window and threw up her hands. “Bars. I hope this isn't a sign of things to come in my life.”

 

55

Leon parked the van around the corner and went on foot to the house as he'd been told to do. He wore his utility company uniform and carried the high-tech-appearing device that conveyed the impression it was testing equipment. Hanging from his shoulder was a tool bag.

He would have preferred to have used a gun in carrying out his assignments but the Voice forbade it. Besides the noise and evidence a gun created, there was too much chance for Leon to go wild and crazy with a gun as he had when he'd got his hands on a foster father's gun when he was a young teen.

He walked slowly, in no hurry. Along the way he saw people through picture windows, families eating dinner, people watching TV. He felt no curiosity, no envy, no loneliness, when he saw the people dining and relaxing together. What he felt was irritation at the thought of trying to be sociable. If he had been at a dinner table with other people he would have been angry and rattled. Almost anything he didn't flow with could cause him to go into a frenzy until medication and the soothing Voice calmed him.

He felt isolated and alienated from all people—and angry at them for his powerlessness. When he fantasized about people it was not being part of a warm family group but having people fear him. Punishing them for the way they treated him and getting their rapt attention by frightening them gave him power.

He didn't understand the concept of respect for others and didn't give it to anyone. What he thought of as respect from others to him was their fear and trepidation of him.

Several times he had briefly experienced living in a house with a family during attempts at getting him foster care, but he preferred being by himself. As usual, last night he stayed at a motel—a different one than he stayed in the night before. He didn't choose the place, pay for it or sign the register. He found the address to the motel and a key on his passenger seat when he returned from relieving himself at a gas station restroom. The room was always booked for him and he never stayed in the same room for more than two nights.

He always ate in his room or the van because he didn't do well in restaurants—too often he heard someone speaking that reminded him of his nonexistent father. And sometimes he just stared at people. Not really out of curiosity, not wondering about their lives—mostly because sometimes he just kept looking at the same person for no apparent reason, making the target nervous as hell.