The Insider (25 page)

“They said they were going to kill you if they didn't get the keys. I wasn't about to let that happen.”

They took a taxi from Union Square to the Richmond District and the far reaches of Geary Street, finally arriving at the Parkview Inn, a faded motel circa 1965. The motel stood by itself among some apartment buildings of similar vintage across the street from Golden Gate Park. The Parkview had a neon sign out front that looked as if it hadn't been lit since the 1970s that read COLOR TV—VACANCY. The neon lights that would have allowed for the option of “No” Vacancy had been inartfully removed from the sign. The afternoon was rapidly darkening as a storm blew in. There was only one car in the parking lot, and Will guessed that it belonged to the manager.

“Didn't I read about this place in
Conde Nast Traveler
?” Claire deadpanned, walking past the curtained windows of the other rooms, which showed no signs of life.

“I wanted a place where there was no chance we'd be found.”

“Then I'd say mission accomplished.”

After registering, they opened the door and were greeted by a room that was small, dingy, and spartan, but serviceable. The walls were adorned with paintings of sailboats that were intended to be realist in style, but were so crudely executed that they looked more like abstracts. When Will switched on the television set with the imitation wood-grain finish, it gave the evening newscasters a sickly green tint.

The room had two windows, one in front facing the street and another on the rear wall. He walked to the back of the room and drew the rear window's curtain back gingerly with one finger, as if examining a crime scene.

“How's the view?” Claire asked skeptically. “They call this place the Parkview, right?”

“I think they better start calling it Parking Lot View.”

“Do you think we're safe here?” Claire asked.

“Yeah, sure. For now. I don't see how they could find us here, and I didn't see anyone following us.”

“What should we do now?”

“I think we have to report what we know about the BART attack. It's one thing to keep quiet about an insider trading scheme. It's something else to withhold information about a terrorist attack.”

“I agree,” Claire said. “But how do we do it?”

“I'll take care of it,” Will said. “I'm going to make a call that no one will be able to trace, but I'll need to go out for a while.”

Will walked down Geary until he found a convenience store, where he paid cash for a cell phone with prepaid minutes. Will entered the parking lot of a gas station that was closed for renovations. He scanned the parking lot and the sidewalks in all directions until he was certain that there was no one within fifty yards of him to overhear, then dialed the number of the vice unit of the San Francisco Police Department. Will bypassed the department's hotline number because he was sure that those calls were recorded. He didn't want to give anyone the opportunity to use voice recognition software to identify him. Will had considered dialing Homeland Security or the FBI but figured that he should not underestimate the ability of those agencies to trace a call.

Will spoke quickly and tried to deepen his voice as he recited his statement, which warned of a terrorist attack on the BART trains using sarin gas sometime in the near future. He even mentioned Aashif Agha and Boka by name and noted the involvement of the city's Russian
mafiya
.

He hung up the phone just as the police officer on the other end of the line was beginning to stammer out a question. Will knew that the message was detailed enough to be taken seriously, particularly when the police figured out that Aashif Agha was a real terrorist who was known by Homeland Security to be in the Bay Area. The BART trains would probably be swarming with police in time for the next morning's commute.

Will tossed the phone into the maw of a garbage truck as it passed by on its rounds. If the police managed to track the location of the phone using its GPS receiver, it would probably be on the other side of the city by the time they found it.

As Will walked back down Geary to the motel, a few heavy raindrops began to splatter on the sidewalk. A storm was sweeping in, turning the afternoon to night in a matter of minutes, as if a curtain had been drawn.

Will awoke to the sound of a dull thump and a muffled curse. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw Claire pulling on her jeans in the dark. She had stubbed her toe against a chair and was hopping on one foot.

“Hey, where are you going?” Will said softly, drunk with sleep.

“I'm going to get a soda from the machine. Do you want anything?”

Will pondered for a moment. “Nah.”

“Okay, back in a minute.”

Claire opened the door, and a gust of cold, damp air entered the room, rousing him. He sat up in bed and realized that he was cotton-mouthed and that he did want a soda. He climbed out of bed and pulled on his jeans, shirt, and running shoes.

Outside, the storm had arrived. The rain sounded like the hiss of a blank tape turned up to thundering volume. Turning to check that the door was locked, he paused, brought up short by the sense that he had just seen something.

The streetlamp outside the motel illuminated the shifting patterns of the rain against the night's black backdrop. Will thought that he had just detected a movement behind him in the darkness that wasn't from the rain or wind.

Will turned back around to face the street. Just outside the arc of the streetlamp, he saw two figures walking toward the motel. Behind them was a shadow that bore the distinctive Detroit stylings of the Lincoln Town Car.

When they saw that he had spotted them, Nikolai and Yuri began running toward him. Like a bear, Nikolai was incongruously fast for his size.

Will looked down the motel's walkway, searching for Claire. He saw a sign labeled VENDING that pointed around the corner. He knew that if he went after her, they would cut him off.

Will clawed at his pocket for the room key and unlocked the door. He slammed the door shut and fumbled attaching the chain. Will's heart rate accelerated, and his mouth dropped open as he strove to take in enough oxygen to operate his personal disaster response system.

His eyes darted around the room, settling on the rear window, the only escape route. Will grabbed Claire's purse from the dresser and dug in it for the memory stick, but all he found were car keys, cosmetics, and Kleenex. The Russians were now trying to kick in the front door, producing sounds like the muffled boom of depth charges. He dumped the contents of the purse on the dresser and at last found the memory stick.

Will didn't turn to look as he struggled with the sash, which had probably not been opened in years. He tore fingernails trying to get a better grip. Then he heard the sound of shattering glass as Nikolai and Yuri turned their attention to the front window, a more yielding point of entry.

Finally, with an unhappy groan, the rear window opened. Will punched out the wire mesh screen and climbed out, tripping and falling forward to land heavily hands-first on the parking lot asphalt. He scrambled across Geary Street and into the dense woods of the park. Branches whipped at his face and arms.

Will stopped running when he heard the sound of the Russians talking at the edge of the park. He didn't want to draw them with the sound of crackling underbrush.

“Will! Don't make us come in there after you!” Nikolai shouted. “We have Claire.”

Next came Claire's voice. “Just run, Will! They—” It sounded like she was cut short by a blow.

At that moment, he considered standing up and walking out of the woods to stop them from hitting Claire, but he knew that would do no good. Unarmed, he would be no match for them. And once they had the memory stick, Nikolai and Yuri would have every reason to kill them both. The memory stick was probably the only thing keeping Claire alive. Will quietly crept deeper into the woods.

“What kind of man are you? You are going to let us do this to your girlfriend? Claire, why would you want to be with such a pussy?”

For a moment, there was silence.

Then Will's cell phone, which was in his pants pocket, began ringing—loudly. Will pulled the phone from his pocket and shut it off, cursing his stupidity. The Russians had his cell number and had called him so that the ringing would give away his hiding place.

“I heard it! He's over there!” Yuri said. Then, to Will, he taunted, “You should have answered it, asshole! I had something very important to say to you!”

There was the sound of snapping branches as Yuri and Nikolai came after him. Will fled in the opposite direction but soon reached sparse brush at the edge of the woods. Ahead of him lay the grassy expanse of the park, where he would be easily spotted. He changed direction, moving through the woods parallel to the park and away from the motel. The noise of Nikolai and Yuri blundering through the underbrush was growing more distant. He only hoped that they could not hear him as clearly as he could hear them.

Will hunkered down on a muddy slope in a stand of trees and waited for his heart to stop hammering. His face stung where it had been whipped by branches. After a while, he no longer heard anything but the sound of the rain, the rustling of the wind in the trees, and the more distant sound of the swish of car tires on the wet pavement of Geary. Yuri and Nikolai must have been moving in the opposite direction because he could no longer hear their voices.

He pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed Yuri's cell phone number. He thought he heard Yuri's phone ringing distantly somewhere in the woods to his left, but he might have been mistaken.

Will whispered into the phone in case they were closer than he thought. “I have a proposal for you.”

“I'm listening.”

“I'll give you the memory stick on one condition—you let Claire go. And you don't hurt her. You don't lay a hand on her.”

“No problem. So let's get out of these wet fucking woods and get this over with.”

“I'm not an idiot. We're not making the exchange out here. We'll do it in a public place, with lots of people around. I'll call you tomorrow morning to arrange the meeting.”

“If we don't find you tonight.”

“Yes.”

“Because if we find you, then I do not think we would be able to honor the deal.”

“And I won't honor the deal if I find out you've done anything to harm Claire.” Will shut off the phone.

As his pulse slowed, he began debating the question of how Nikolai and Yuri had managed to track them down at, of all places, the Parkview Inn. Only a few logical possibilities presented themselves. He doubted that the Russians had somehow followed them ever since they got on the BART train. If they had, they wouldn't have waited so long to move on them.

Will was still carrying the cell phone that the Russians had given him, and he wondered if it might contain a tracking device. He threw the phone into the bushes far away from him. Perhaps they had been tracked using the GPS in Will's own cell phone, but that seemed awfully sophisticated for Nikolai and Yuri. Nonetheless, Will removed the battery from his cell phone.

There was also the possibility that Claire had tipped the Russians to their location. Claire had been conveniently out of the room when Nikolai and Yuri had come to kill him. He found it difficult to distrust Claire, but it was the simplest explanation, and thus the most plausible.

She had certainly sounded sincere when she urged him to run. And a real blow seemed to have cut her short. Most persuasive of all was her smashed finger. But then again, he hadn't actually seen what was underneath that splint. Will was left with some strong suspicions about Claire, but not nearly enough to abandon her to two Russian thugs.

He decided to stay in his hiding place for a while longer. If he tried to leave the park now, he would be much easier to spot crossing a street or an open field. In an hour or so, Nikolai and Yuri would probably tire of searching for him in the rain.

Will checked his watch—it was one thirty A.M. He listened to the falling rain until he heard patterns in the sound, and then nothing at all. He concentrated on the ticking of waterlogged branches, trying to tell if it was the sound of someone creeping closer through the woods. After a while, his thoughts drifted to subjects beyond the immediate danger. He wondered if the BART attack would proceed without the encryption keys, and whether the police would be able to stop it if it did. He hoped that Nikolai and Yuri weren't hurting Claire. He pondered the fact that he would not be reporting to the offices of Reynolds Fincher. He wondered how he would hold up in prison. He shuffled and reshuffled these concerns as he waited in the darkness, shivering and wet.

In a way, this terrifying night seemed oddly familiar to Will; he had a recurring nightmare that involved flight from pursuers. It began with him sitting in a movie theater watching a George Romeroesque zombie picture. The theater was one in which he had seen many movies as a young boy—the Cameo in Brookfield, Missouri. It was the only theater in his father's hometown, a Depression-era shoe-box about ten seats across with creaky wooden floorboards. The childhood reminiscence ended and the nightmare began when the zombies shuffled off the movie screen and proceeded to hunt him through the small town, from the strangely pristine alleys of Main Street to the gazebo in the town square. Despite the fantastical nature of the scenario (and the thinly veiled allegory regarding fears of conformity and parental control), it prompted a very real terror. Will jerked upright in bed after waking from one of these episodes, gasping for breath like he had been submerged in dark water, rather than a dream.