Off the Grid (12 page)

23

H
arley Davidson’s mansion was aglow with light, as if the grand old structure had gussied itself up in celebration of Grace MacBride’s safe return from her solo road trip. She’d stopped briefly at the mansion to drop off Charlie, then immediately left to see Magozzi. None of them were happy about letting her go so soon, but it was hard to dampen their relief at having her home again. For the first time since Grace had left for Florida, the mood and dynamics in the house seemed blessedly normal.

Oh, sure, there’d been a few dark wrinkles, like someone trying to kill John, and Grace killing two men, but by God, Grace was home and safe, and together the four of them could solve any problem, make everything right again. But, oh my, it was taking a long time.

They’d been working almost nonstop since the package from Grace had arrived yesterday afternoon. It had taken most of last night to reprogram the Beast to search the Web for any common matches between John Smith and the two students who’d tried to kill him. Now the damn thing had been running all day, and not a single match had been found. Trouble was, the Web had too much information flooding it to sort through, unless your parameters were really tight. And then there was the dreaded possibility that no match existed. The Beast was still humming, still searching, but they were all on edge waiting for it to stop and display
NO MATCHES FOUND
on the screen.

Annie and Roadrunner were reading the last of John’s FBI files and cases they’d hacked into, and Harley was tackling John’s mirror drive, starting with a ton of e-mails that were all business-oriented and really boring. He worked the mouse with his left hand and stroked Charlie’s head with his right. The dog had been a lively distraction for the first half hour, his stubby, chewed-off tail wagging furiously as he made his way from chair to chair, licking the daylights out of their hands and faces, but Harley was his ultimate destination. He sat next to his chair and plopped his head in Harley’s lap, and there he stayed.

Harley gave the dog a last vigorous ear scratching, then pushed away from his desk, rubbing his eyes. “I have to break. I’m going blind and I’m starving to death. How long has Grace been gone?”

“Two hours and four minutes,” Roadrunner said. “Do you think we should call Magozzi?”

Suddenly, Charlie lifted his head, then scrambled across the polished maple floor on his way to the stairs.

“Don’t bother,” Harley said, chuckling at the dog’s hasty exit. “I think she’s here.”

They found her in the kitchen with Charlie at her feet, staring into Harley’s refrigerator. “Harley, there’s nothing in here but sausage.”

“Not true. I have deli cuts in the meat drawer and a gallon of matzoh ball soup from Cecil’s Deli in the freezer.”

“Perfect.” She slipped onto a stool at the prep counter. “Wait on me. I’m exhausted.”

“And yet you don’t look it. That tan is hot. Annie, slice that loaf of Italian bread, will you?”

Grace put her elbows on the counter and closed her eyes for just a moment, letting the warm comfort of being home wash over her. Annie put an arm around her. “Are you sleeping, sugar?”

“Just resting my eyes. It’s been a long three days. Did you find anything yet?”

Harley put the soup in the microwave and set the timer for five minutes. “Not a damn thing. We plugged in John’s mirror info and all the data from the wallets you gave us into the Beast. If those three ever crossed cyberspace paths, we haven’t found it yet. I’m doing an eyes-on of John’s mirror drive, but it’s slow work.”

• • •

Annie nibbled
on a piece of deli ham. “Did Magozzi have any ideas?”

Grace lifted her shoulders. The gesture seemed an enormous effort. “He and Gino are already making calls to law enforcement in Florida and D.C. The bad news is, Don Kardon—he’s the marina owner—got a call from a stranger with some lame story about being in negotiations to buy his boat, and that never happened.”

Annie’s brows lifted. It was one of those expressions she rarely used, ever since she’d noticed that first tiny wrinkle in her forehead.

“So, someone is still trying to track him down. I surely hope that boy’s a good hider.”

“He is. But we’re right out there. If they want John badly enough, they’re going to start looking for people he’s connected to. That’s us, so keep a sharp eye.”

“For what?” asked Roadrunner.

“Things, cars, people that don’t belong.”

Harley set a steaming bowl of soup in front of her and Grace leaned over it and breathed deeply, as if she could absorb the nourishment without the effort of actually eating. “We’ve got it all covered, Grace. Eat first, then get some sleep.”

After she’d eaten, Annie followed her up to the guest bedroom Grace used when they worked nights and tucked her in. “I need a shower,” Grace said as the comforter settled over her.

“You can shower in the morning.”

“Will you feed Charlie?”

“Of course we will. Sleep.”

24

D
on Kardon was sitting on an overturned bait bucket on the dock in front of the dark marina office, sipping a beer and listening to the plastic crackle of palm fronds as they swayed in the warm, night breeze. He smelled the faint hint of jasmine and salt mingling in the air, felt the easy motion of water as it ruffled beneath him like a liquid lullaby. Farther out in the harbor, a wiggly blur of lights from the docked boats stretched across the water, as if they were yearning for the adventure of the dark Atlantic beyond.

He chuckled to himself. Most people probably didn’t figure ex-cons for poetical types, pondering jasmine and the play of lights on water, but they’d be wrong. A lifetime of ugliness put you in the pen, and the ugliness sure as hell didn’t stop there, it only got worse. But if you were smart and lucky and got out alive, you started seeing things in a real different light. Kardon was no beauty. Never had been, and he sometimes wondered if his life would have taken a different tack if he’d been able to get a date in high school. That’s surely all it would have taken, all he ever wanted, really: one person in this world who actually wanted to be with him, or at least liked him a little bit. Funny thing. He was looking fifty in the eye and never once knew what it was like to wake up with a woman next to him he hadn’t paid, or a kid bouncing on his chest who thought his dad put up the sun every morning.

He wasn’t complaining—no victim, he—just imagining what it might have been like. Not that life was bad now. He had a lot of money from the marina, a decent slice of the American Dream, and a few friends he could count on. Maybe that was enough.

He caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye, and his wandering thoughts stopped dead. It could have been a dog on one of the marina docks or a possum searching for scraps. It could have been nothing. Or it could be something. After ten years inside, Kardon’s instincts always went with something. Ignoring that feeling that things weren’t quite right could get you killed in the yard of a prison, or in your own front yard on the outside. The footsteps behind you on a dark deserted street? Run like hell. Screw making that person feel bad about himself. Screw appearing paranoid or weak. Listen to that little warning voice inside you. That’s what you learned in the pen, and wasn’t it amazing that the murder rate was lower in prisons than it was in an equal population on the outside? That’s what Kardon told a lot of seminars he spoke at to fulfill the community service part of his probation.

Some of the people listened, and probably they were the ones who were still walking around. Listen to the voice.

But Kardon hadn’t heard that voice since he’d moved to the Keys, and the sorry truth was it scared the hell out of him.

He felt a sharp crick in his neck and realized he’d been frozen in place for a long time, his head cocked at an unusual angle, his eyes glued to that place where he’d seen movement.

He saw shadowy silhouettes of boats, the pink and green neon sign of the bar across the little harbor, and not much else. Maybe his instincts were rusty. Maybe he was scaring himself like a stupid kid watching a horror movie. Or maybe not. He caught his breath in his throat and let his eyes pierce the dark and remembered the night John and Grace had gone out to sea and come hightailing back under power in the middle of the night, both of them a little rattled. They didn’t tell him anything, and he didn’t ask, but he knew damn well something had happened out there.

Keep an eye out, will you, Don? If anyone comes around looking for me, play dumb, stay out of their way, then call Grace and let her know.

Suddenly, there was a light where one hadn’t existed a second ago. Normally, that wouldn’t bother him. Most of the marina lights went out at full dark so those patrons who slept on their boats wouldn’t be disturbed, and many of them used Maglites to find their way home after a night of clubbing. But now there were two beams from two Maglites, and they were coursing along the side of John Smith’s boat.

This was not good. Don knew it in his heart, which was now pounding furiously and half in his throat as his basest survival instincts took over automatically; another thing he knew plenty about. These were not drunk or drugged-up kids poking around for a joy ride to steal. There was some purpose here.

Fight or flight?

It was a split-second decision: both. You had to assess your enemy before you could engage or evacuate. There were at least two of them, most likely armed. If he confronted them now at a hundred feet away, he’d give up his current position, and then the advantage was theirs. They probably wouldn’t want to shoot, because they were here for something else, maybe something from the boat, or even records from his office, so cops on the premises might be their greatest fear. That meant cops on the premises was the best possible solution for him personally, and a great irony, Don thought, as a man who’d spent half his life evading them.

So he withdrew very slowly and carefully into the shadows, backing into the dark marina office in a reverse crab walk. He grabbed the phone from his desk, pushed away his office chair, and crawled under the cubbyhole. He groped in the dark and felt the reassuring steel of the sawed-off shotgun he had fastened on the front panel for emergencies, but decided to go the lawful route for now. It was illegal for felons to own guns, and God knew what crimes had been committed by this one he’d bought off the street. Probably heinous ones, where he might not have an alibi, which would send him back to the pen for life, maybe. He couldn’t go there now, although he did take it off the rack in case his near future required some firepower as a last resort.

He punched the number nine into the phone, but before he could complete his 9-1-1 emergency call, a hand landed on his shoulder and pulled him out from under the desk.

Shit. There were at least three of them.

“What the fuck!” Don screamed, knowing his options were running out fast, hoping somebody would hear him and call the cops. He felt a crunch in his jaw as his head slammed down onto his desk blotter. He tasted blood in his mouth a second later and heard more footsteps, moving closer. This was not going to end well, because he heard the screech of duct tape being ripped from a roll, and no way Don Kardon was going on that ride.

He grabbed the hands of the man who was on him, twisted him around, and jammed his knee into his nuts with a satisfying crunch, then flipped him over the desk. “Motherfucker!” he screamed again, as loud as he could, then jumped back into the cubbyhole, grabbed the shotgun, and started firing with impunity as he felt slugs hitting his body in really critical places that he knew would kill him. He thought of night-blooming jasmine and how good it smelled, then he thought of the American Dream. His would die tonight, but not without a goddamned fight.

25

H
arley and sleep had never been strangers. He could nod off just about anywhere, any time—on a plane, in a car, on the sofa in front of the TV. Even when he was in high-octane mode, pursuing his work or another of his passions, he could turn his intensity off like a faucet when he needed to rest. But tonight sleep had been elusive. He’d tossed and turned in his big bed, catching tiny bursts of half sleep here and there until he’d finally given up the fight near dawn.

He took the stairs up to the office so the whir of the elevator didn’t wake the others, started a pot of coffee, then sank into his desk chair and woke up his monitor so he could check on the computers.

After staring at the screen for a few seconds, he shifted his gaze sideways and rubbed his sleep-blurred eyes to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. All their computers were connected to the Beast, and how Harley loved that machine. He was its primary architect and he could tell it to do anything: how to distribute tasks, how its autonomous nodes should communicate, either by message or shared memory.

Normally an alarm would sound when the Beast made a connection, but at night the alarm went silent and lights blinked on whatever computer showed activity. Tonight that was Harley’s, and the jury-rigged numeric keyboard was flashing all its numbers at once. Not one connection, not two, but several.

He walked over to the Beast on the back wall, pushed print, and a long sheet rolled out of the machine. It was a list of websites—dozens of them. He called up a few of them and just sat there, staring at them, breathing hard, before he went to wake up Roadrunner.

“This better be good,” the thin man mumbled as he stood looking over Harley’s shoulder. He was tying a striped robe around a pair of sagging Jockey shorts, a gesture Harley deeply appreciated. You looked at Roadrunner’s ribs too long, you wanted to rub him with spices and slap him on the grill.

“None of it’s good. It’s all bad. Check this out.” He cued up one of the websites and leaned sideways to give Roadrunner a good look at the screen. Roadrunner was instantly, completely awake. He leaned closer to the monitor, gaping at John Smith’s headshot staring back at him from the screen. All the writing on the page was in Arabic except for a few English words printed below John’s face in large block letters.
JOHN SMITH, FBI, LOCATION UNKNOWN—JIHAD
.

“Jesus, Harley. What the hell is this?”

Harley’s voice was grim. “It’s a jihadist website. Every time some freaked-out radical imam decides someone should die, they put a death warrant out on the Web that goes viral, like they did with that Dutch filmmaker, remember? This is the new strategy, thanks to our friend the Internet. No need for massive organization, no need for long-term planning—just throw out the jihad and let the lone wolf freelancers hunt him down.”

Roadrunner look stricken. “A jihad?”

Harley nodded. “Worldwide. There are a couple dozen more of these sites with John front and center. Turns out the two Saudis who tried to kill John published a couple of radical papers on these sites under their own names. John visited the same sites, and his photo popped up on all of them two weeks ago. That’s the connection the Beast finally picked up. John’s name and theirs on the same sites. Apparently our boy did something to really piss an imam off.”

Roadrunner tugged his robe closer, suddenly cold. His face was chalk white. “Holy shit. How do you piss off terrorists?”

“That’s what we’ve got to find out.”