"What does this guy look like?" Jesse interrupted Nika.
"The Michelin Tire Man with Baby Huey's face," I said.
"I don't know who they are."
"Neither do I," said Nika. "Think of a totally bald Tony Soprano—who's never been angry in his life."
"Got it," Jesse agreed.
Nika resumed her account. "So I agreed to meet your father—"
"Could we call me Russell? Or just Gramps?"
"—to meet Russell down at Spanish Banks Beach in the middle of the night. That's by—"
"I know where it is,' Jesse said. "Dad sent me a photo of Vancouver once that said on the back it was taken from there."
"Well, Zandor was just offshore, in a small boat. I couldn't reach him, and he could regulate his distance from me. He came within range. Then he spoke to me on a cell phone, and he . . . " She glanced away for a moment. "He told me things, that . . . well, he proved to me that he could read my mind. Deep."
"Okay," Jesse said.
She shook her head. "No. Not like you're thinking, like a carnie act, where he asked leading questions and I told him how to hook me."
"Okay," Jesse said.
She shook her head again. "You have to really get this. He told me when, where and how I'd lost my virginity, which only the other party knew, and he told me how I'd felt about it, which nobody knew." Her cheeks darkened.
"Okay," Jesse said again, blushing slightly himself. "I buy the premise. My father knows a telepath. Please believe I'm not being flippant when I say I'm not terribly surprised. He would if anyone ever did. We can move on. This Sandor—"
"Zandor. Zandor Zudenigo. It's Serbian."
"This guy proved to you he was a telepath. But you say it hurts him to do it."
"Horribly. And there's no off switch. He's a hermit by choice. Your fa—Russell is one of the few people he can stand to be near."
Jesse nodded. "Because he doesn't judge people. I get that. Except for me."
"Beg pardon?"
"Skip it. Zandor proved all this to you. Told an armed police officer he knew all her secrets. Why?"
"He had unwillingly read the mind of . . . a monster."
"A Bundy?"
She shook her head. "Much worse."
He blinked. "A Dahmer?"
"Much worse."
"We're not talking about Picton? The pig farmer slash prostitute killer they're trying right now, supposed to have taken out a couple of dozen women?"
"Much worse."
He paled slightly. "Not just . . . worse."
Again she shook her head. "Much worse. I've never heard or read of anybody as bad. In history. At the time that Zudie . . . I'm sorry, I should call him Zandor, but he looks so much like a cartoon character or a bald Tony Soprano, it's hard not to think of him as Zudie. At the time Zudie read him, Allen was planning to kidnap and rape and degrade and torture to death as perfectly blameless a family of four as he'd been able to find in Vancouver. Over a period of days. With great ingenuity and with true scientific brilliance and without a morsel of mercy. As a work of art. He created and enhanced agony as others make music or dance or paint." She broke off.
"And he was an Armstrong," I said. "A Baryshnikov. A Salvador Dali. In his spare time he became a cybermillionaire, a respected code warrior."
Jesse was finally beginning to boggle a bit, and I could see it irritated him. He wanted to believe anything Nika said to him, even if I agreed with it, but this was getting thick. He soldiered on. "So Zudie gave you evidence that would—"
I took it. He was used to being skeptical of me. "All Zudie had to give us was what happened to be passing through Allen's head during maybe fifteen to thirty seconds—during which time he believed he was just about to crash his plane into Howe Sound and die. He spent most of that time regretting the ghoulish masterpiece he wasn't going to get to complete, savoring the ones he had, and gleefully telling God to go fuck Himself. Then his engine caught again, and he flew out of Zudie's range. We had just enough clues to start hunting him. And no choice in the world."
"And absolutely nothing on him in any legal sense," Nika clarified. "I couldn't have gotten a warrant to tap his phone, even if I'd known his last name. I didn't have reasonable grounds to stop him on the sidewalk and ask him his name."
"All we had was his first name, and that his private playground, his outdoor art studio, was somewhere along the Sea To Sky Highway," I went on.
"Jesus Christ," Jesse said. "That's like saying, somewhere along the New England Thruway, isn't it?"
I nodded. "Except it's ninety-eight percent empty forest. Handy for a man who doesn't want them gagged."
Jesse closed his eyes for a moment. "So what did you do?"
"We started driving the Sea To Sky, pointing a camcorder out the window as we went."
He opened them again. "Hoping what, exactly?"
"That when we got home, Zudie might spot, somewhere in several hours of video, the unmarked turnoff he'd seen beside the highway in Allen's mind's eye. The trail that led to Painland."
He started to look interested. "I see. How'd it work out?"
"Badly," Nika said, "He was much smarter than we were."
"With much better video gear," I said. "It filmed license plates of anything that so much as slowed down near his special turnoff. A live feed, back to his home near the city. He damn near beat us here."
"Which turned out to be good," Nika said. "He was taken by surprise, busy torturing us, when Zandor showed up."
We both fell silent. Jesse waited a reasonable time, then a little more, and finally burst out, "And did what?"
I looked at Nika. Nika looked at me. She shrugged you try it.
Okay. I turned back to my son. "Zandor ate his mind and his body died. Right about where you're sitting."
I heard Nika draw breath, but if she had any correction or amplification to offer, she thought better of it.
I watched Jesse decide to believe us, and start thinking it through, and waited for him to ask what we'd done with the body. He did not, then or ever. If you want to say that's appalling, I won't argue. If I say it made me proud, you'd better not either.
Nika and I let him sit with it until he was ready to proceed. "So," he said, "you now figure a partner, or apprentice, or acolyte or admirer or art-lover or whatever, has connected you with this rich man's disappearance, and put an ultra-high-tech GPS snitch on your car? Why the hell did you come out here in the first place? Have you got Zudie out there in the woods, somewhere, getting ready to eat this guy's mind too?"
"We can't reach Zudie," I said. "He stopped talking to us."
"To you," Nika said.
"To either of us. To anybody. He jumped in a hole and pulled it in after him."
"Why?" Jesse asked patiently.
I gestured vaguely with my hands. "He ate a guy's mind."
"He had to."
I nodded. "Apparently that doesn't help enough."
He closed his eyes and began massaging one eyebrow. It is a mannerism I have myself, one that my wife used to gently mock me for. "I think I'm actually relieved to know that," he decided.
Neither of us responded. I know part of me felt the same way, strongly. But the question was complicated. What Zandor had done that night had saved my life, and Nika's, just for openers. It unquestionably also saved the four other innocent lives we knew Allen already planned to take, at the very least. Arguably it also saved all the countless other lives Allen would have gone on to take in the course of pursuing his Muse. And "lives" is only part of it, and not even the worst. Allen didn't just take lives, he took souls, He cultivated agony like orchids, cut despair like diamond. Many of his victims never bled at all, but each one hemorrhaged every single drop of hope they had in them before he let them go.
And still, what Zudie had done—had been forced to do—creeped me out a little. I guess because it creeped him out a lot.
Jesse shook his head and rebooted. "Okay, this is all history. Let's get back to: how did you realize there was a new problem to come talk over with Russell, before you knew there was a bug on your car?"
Nika took a deep breath. "My cousin Vasco . . . " She started over. "My cousin Vasco does computer stuff for CSIS in Toronto. That's our—" She saw that he knew what CSIS is. "Deep stuff. They caught him hacking into their system when he was a kid, and recruited him. We were best friends growing up, so I think he talked about what he does there to me more than to anyone else—and he told me hardly anything. Just hints, and not many of those. Once, he said if I ever needed to know everything there was to know about some person badly enough, I could have it all within an hour. Everything. Every penny he ever spent, every e-mail he ever sent, every webpage he ever looked at. Anybody. The chief of police. The premier. Anybody not in the intelligence community, was how he put it."
"So you asked him to very quietly and very anonymously find out who Allen might have swapped jpg's and videos with?" Jesse guessed.
She winced. "I didn't have the courage. Allen was so smart, I was terrified of anybody he'd trust that much. And . . . look, I was not going to give my cousin, a fellow officer, the name of a man I helped murder and ask him to run it. Okay?"
He nodded. "So then—?"
"I asked as a hypothetical what could he do with somebody who'd been dead thirty-five years, since before computers? How much information could he turn up now? He said that was much tougher, could take as long as a couple of days to run, unless there was something special about him, and I said he was considered a math genius in his day, and—"
My ears started to ring. I sat bolt upright. "Oh my God, no!"
"Russell, I never so much as hinted or implied that he hasn't been dead for thirty-five years. I just—"
"Nika, he told me the fucking CIA almost got him, once! That's why he's supposed to be dead."
"He never told me that, and neither did you!" she said angrily.
I had no reply. I never had, now that I thought of it. I had simply assumed that Zudie would.
"And even so, I warned Vasco to be careful, that there might have been a time when three-letter-agencies were interested in Zudie, back in the day. I didn't tell him why I wanted to know about this dead guy—but I did stress that it was not important enough to be worth any risk at all, that he should back away if he sniffed anything bad. He laughed at me."
"How did you—" I started to ask, and she guessed where I was going.
"We used to exchange holiday e-mails and phone calls like everybody, but for real communication we always used a goofy system he came up with when we were kids together, that was totally secure."
Jesse looked politely dubious. "I've been told there's no such thing," he said.
She shrugged. "You tell me how to beat it. He got one of those free e-mail accounts, under a name that was just a string of meaningless letters, and gave me the password to it verbally. Any time one of us wanted to write the other privately, we'd open that account, type our message, without addressing it to anyone . . . then put it in the Drafts folder, and quit."
"My god, that's beautiful," Jesse said at once.
It took me a little longer to grasp it, but once I did I had to agree: it was breathtaking. God himself couldn't intercept the transmission . . . if no transmission ever took place. As far as the system was concerned, the message never went anywhere: it merely got contemplated by two different computers. Nika's cousin was smart.
Because she was frowning Jesse felt he could, so now we were all frowning. Time to find out why. "What happened, Nika?"
"I get a call from my sergeant passing on a phone message. My cousin in Toronto had called to say goodbye, he was being transferred overseas."
"Jesus Christ," I said involuntarily.
"What did you do?" Jesse asked gently.
"Sat still and thought hard for a long time. Then I got hold of a laptop that couldn't be traced to me, pirated wireless from a café, and checked our Drafts folder. No message. Three days in a row I tried. I was trying to make myself believe that a little thing like being paralyzed would be enough to keep my cousin Vasco offline . . . when he called. On the telephone."
She stopped talking. We gave her time.
She attempted a smile unsuccessfully. "He said he'd been promoted to a better position in CSIS's Albanian office, as if that made sense. It was hard to say how long he'd be there. He had a plausible-sounding story about why they were sending him there, and what he would do there, and I think he convinced whoever was monitoring the call that he had convinced me. I did my best to help. But we both knew he was reading a script. He made no mention of my data-search, and cut me off at the first syllable when I started to. I forgot to ask him for his phone number, had to get it from Call Identify after he hung up. It took me ten minutes to think of it."
"Jesus." It was Jesse who said it this time.
"Look, we should get back outside," she said. "Even if whoever owns that bug isn't paying close attention, they're bound to notice eventually that I hardly ever say anything."
"Damn it, we're not even close to done here," I said.
"For now we are," she said, and got up.
"She's right," my son said inevitably, and headed for the door with her. "Look how late it's getting: it's nearly dark."
"Don't be silly," I said. "It's only—"
"Oh shit," Nika said, and opened the door just in time for a wave of thunder to roll in. At once it began to pour.
"Where the hell did that come from?" Jesse asked indignantly. "It was sunny just a while ago."
I wedged past her and Jesse, sprinted to the porch table, grabbed the recorder and scampered back to the house, a total of fourteen steps. When I got back inside I was as wet as if I'd stood in the shower for twice that long. I stopped on the doorway rug that kept pine needles from being tracked into the house, and wrung out my shirt and hair and stepped out of my sodden shoes. Jesse watched me with wide eyes. "That's not rain," he said with awe. "That's a fucking waterfall."
"What, that little drizzle?" Nika and I both said at the same time, looked at each other in surprise, and then both added, "It rains more in Seattle than it does here," and looked at each other again.
Jesse shook his head. "Vancouver people, no shit. It rains more in Seattle than it does in Nairobi in monsoon season."
I excused myself, went to my bedroom, and changed into dry clothes as quickly as I could. I gave my hair a quick toweling and hasty brushing but didn't feel I had time for the hair dryer.
Nika felt the urgency even more than I did. "It strikes me," she said as I returned to the living room, "that now would be a good time to get out of here."
Jesse and I both turned to look at her.
"Russell, I'm very sorry," she said to me. "I checked my car for bugs myself before I left for work this morning. I spotted some asshole staking me out this morning after parade, but I was sure I'd lost him. It just never occurred to me anyone could manage to bug a car parked outside the police station. I made damn sure nobody tailed me after I got off the ferry. I thought I had taken adequate precautions to protect you. I fucked up. I've burned this location. It's time to be someplace else while we figure out our next move. The rain will cover the sound of us leaving."
"To go where?" Jesse asked. "And in what? SCUBA gear?"
I knew she was exasperated, and he probably did too, but she kept it out of her voice. "To anyplace at all where we're sure nobody else knows we're there. We need to break the tail. If that means walking through the wood in a downpour, then hot-wiring somebody's car and getting off-island on the next ferry, that's what we'll do. We have to lose this jerk and buy time to figure out what to do."
"I see that." I agreed reluctantly, and took a deep breath. "Okay, let me get some water bottles from the fridge to take along."
"I don't see that," Jesse said. "There are three of us. Nika, you're a cop. None of us has done anything wrong. Why don't we just go out to your car and in loud voices invite the jerk in for coffee?"
She shook her head, the exasperation beginning to show. "Jesse, being a cop doesn't give me the kind of weight to deal with somebody who uses gear like that bug. It makes me more vulnerable, because there are handles on me, that people like that know how to use. Nobody I know has the weight to help me. Maybe nobody has that much weight."
"I know people who might," Jesse said. "I work for the largest PR firm on the planet."
"And they probably work for the CIA," I said bitterly. "No, thanks."
Jesse shut up, looking stubborn.
Nika said, "I need more information and some advice before I confront him, and I only know one place on earth where I might get either one, but I don't dare go there or even attempt to until and unless I am absolutely certain I'm not leading this asshole there."
"To Zudie," he said.
"To Zudie," I agreed. "If Mr. X still remembers Zudie after all these years, it's a good bet Zudie will remember him too. And he got clear of him once already, and stayed clear more than thirty years. Maybe with us to help, he could . . . " I trailed off.
"What?" Nika said, her voice harsh. "Maybe he could what?"
I dodged. "Maybe we could discuss this in the rain? For all we know Mr. X on his way here right now. I've got two spare pairs of boots and one spare umbrella—let me get my cellphone—"
"Got a coat and hat I can borrow?" Nika asked. "I don't want to get mine from my car."
"Whoa," Jesse interrupted us. "Nika, I know my father has incipient Alzheimer's—but you're a cop."
"Yeah?"
"Look at me. I come from New York to visit my father on a remote island. Am I going to depend on him to drive me around? Or rent a car at the airport?"
"So where is it? Oh! You wouldn't take a rental down this driveway. It's the one I saw out there by the mailboxes."
Not far from the mouth of my driveway is what I call the Mailbox Box: a blocky green metal box which contains the mailboxes for sixty-four different rural dwellings that are all arguably within walking distance. It's how we spare Canada Post the onerous chore of actually delivering our mail, as if we were real humans, living on the mainland. For tolerably obvious reasons there are parking verges to either side of it, and Jesse was parked on the nearer one.
"That's right," he said. "You might have taken it for Dad's car."
"I did when I saw it," she agreed. "Didn't even notice the rental plates. By the time I saw his out there in the driveway. I'd stopped thinking about it."
Jesse happened to have chosen the same car to rent that I had bought a few years earlier, a Toyota Echo—the same year and color as mine, right down to the bumpers, generic black rather than color coordinated. The amount of delight I'd taken in that simple coincidence was a sign of how nervous I'd been about Jesse's visit, after an estrangement of so many years. (Maybe you can explain to me why the majority of people who buy Echos—a cheap car designed to run just as cheaply as possible—pay extra to have expendable bumpers painted the same color as the car. Do they have their galoshes painted to match their suits, too?)
I tossed Nika a hoodie from the front hall closet, set out an umbrella on the bench just inside the front door, and collected my phone, a flashlight, and three one-liter bottles of cold water while they both suited up for rain. While getting water I noticed the open catfood can plastic-bagged in the fridge and was reminded to put some out for Horsefeathers, adding another dish of the paté kind he hates for Fraidy; then I propped the laundry room door open enough for them both to get in and out. When I got back Nika had found my own boots and was holding open my jacket for me; as I turned around from putting it on, she was holding open the door for us.
I held up a hand. "Hold on. I go first. I live here. You two don't show yourselves until I whistle. If I start singing instead, go out the back door fast and low, head straight into the woods until you hit the stream, then follow it uphill."
"Uphill?" Nika said.
"Harder going, but very soon you come to a footbridge and a path that'll take you to the road and Jesse's car. I'll meet you there if I can. If I'm not there, bug out, go to ground someplace, and find me a good lawyer."
"No such thing," she said automatically.
Jesse's eyes were wide. "Dad—"
"Text me, son. I gotta go," I said, and stepped out the door, closing it behind me.
No one immediately apparent. Rain so thunderous there could be a platoon a hundred meters away counting cadence without being immediately apparent.
Behave naturally. Do not stare in all directions. Act like you're walking to the Mailbox Box to get the mail, which come to think of it you haven't done yet today. Natural to reach into pants pocket for mailbox key. Inspiration: pretend you can't find it. Slow, stop, turn back toward house, excuse to scrutinize everything to your left. Palm keys, remove them from pants pocket, pantomime finding them in jacket pocket—just in time to make it seem natural to convert a 180 turn into a 360, excuse to scrutinize everything to your right. Call me Chingachcook.
No one immediately apparent. No official-looking vehicle visible. It is certainly possible to enter my property and find the house without using the driveway, but I did not believe any city men could or would do so in this rain without extensive preparation. If they were that good, we were screwed. I continued walking up the driveway until I reached the road. No vehicles visible in either direction except Jesse's Echo on the right. A driveway was visible in either direction, and for all I knew squad cars or tanks could be parked fifty meters up either or both of them. The woods could be full of commandos. The rain made it easy to believe there were choppers somewhere nearby.
The hell with it. I walked a few dozen steps back down the driveway, and gave the two-fingered stevedore's whistle my bus-driver father taught me, which can be heard in a hurricane or Manhattan rush hour. At once came the sounds of the front door being opened and closed firmly, and footsteps on my creaky porch, so I turned and finished walking to the mailbox. No mail. I walked back the few steps to Jesse's car and waited there. Externally it looked just like mine.
Jesse and Nika appeared at the mouth of the driveway. I was standing beside the passenger side front door, but Nika walked past me and stood right beside me at the same door, until I got it, and moved to the back door. Okay . . .
Inside, the Echo was quite different from mine. Clean, for a start. No inch-thick layer of forest detritus on the floors. No CDs or MP3 discs in either of the compartments to either side of the car stereo. No ice-scraper in the door boot. No smell of fine marijuana. Worse: it had been sprayed with fake new-car scent recently. It started more easily for Jesse than mine did for me, too, and I knew why: he was starting it correctly, by just turning the key. I cannot for the life of me seem to unlearn the habit of stamping on the accelerator once, first, to set the choke—which today is not only unnecessary but counterproductive. "Have you ever heard of starter fluid?" I asked my son out of curiosity.
"For charcoal briquettes? I use propane. Someone please tell me where we're going."
Nika turned in her seat so she could see both of us. "Russell, is there a place on the island we can use as a base for a day or two while we take turns mounting watch to see who shows up here to get his bug back?"
I thought hard. Or tried to. "Yes, but what's your job situation?"
"Shit." She bit her lip. "I have to get back and book off at 6:00. But I can be back again by, say, 8:00—"
"You'll never make the 7:00 ferry from downtown," I said with certainty. "You'll have to wait for the 8:30, and be back here about 9:15 at the earliest. Just as the last ferry back to the mainland is leaving: you'll be staying the night."
She nodded. "Okay. But after that I have four free days."
Jesse said, "It sounded like you just said you have four days off."
"I do. VPD officers all work four days off, four days on, and today is Day Four for me."
"Sweet."
She shrugged. "Uniform officers work eleven-hour shifts. Investigative section can run longer. We need a longer weekend than most."
"And they shoot about five percent as many people each year as NYPD," I put in. "Even though the GVRD has about a third of New York's population."
Jesse was scowling, but not from the implied insult to his beloved Big Apple. "I hate this plan. Dad, what other ways are there to get to the mainland, other than ferry? Could we rent a boat? Borrow one? Steal one?"
"What's your thought?"
"Where is Mr. X?"
I spread my hands. "Maybe on his way here right now."
"Exactly. We don't know. What we're fairly sure of is that he is not around now, because he couldn't have heard us discussing coming up the driveway but he wasn't here when we did. Even a man unfamiliar with the island should've found this place by now, with GPS. If he hasn't come here yet—why would he?"
"The rain cutting off his audio could have just made him decide to close in." It doesn't take any effort to argue with my son; I could do it in my sleep.
"Only if he was trying to follow the conversation," Nika said. "And if he was, he'd have closed in earlier, when that tape started to repeat. He'd be here by now."
Two against one. "Okay, fine," I said. "Where are you going with this, Jesse?"
"If he's not here or on the way here, where is he?"
"Oh." The penny dropped. He was right. "Very close to the ferry."
"You think?" Nika said. "Wouldn't he stand out?"
"He stands out less there than anywhere else," I told her.
Jesse nodded. "He draws minimal attention, and we can't get on the ferry without him seeing us."
"I can disguise—" Nika began.
"Are you confident you can fool a professional?" Jesse interrupted. "A ferry line is a slow conveyor belt. He could have a camera and face-recognition software on his laptop."
"In the rain? I think I could. Or one of you could drive me, while I lay on the floor in the back—"
"—and blink up at him, standing there on the sidewalk as you go by at five per—"
"Okay—the trunk, then, all right? Unless you think he'll have radar on his laptop." It wasn't just me: Nika was picking up the knack of arguing with him, too.
"I don't know what he's got," Jesse insisted, "except for a bug so expensive, assuming the worst is not a bad policy. What I do know is, when all the cows line up and start moving forward slowly, you don't want to be there."
She rummaged for a comeback, and finally sighed. "I know what a choke-point is. Okay. When you're right, you're right." Damn. Agreeing with him. I'd never tried that. She turned to me. "Well? What have you got?"
A splitting headache. "I can get us a couple of boats."
"Why two?"
"You and Jesse need to get to the mainland before six. I need to get somewhere else fast."
"Why both of us?" Jesse asked.
"Because you're not welcome where I'm going."
"I shouldn't go anywhere," Jesse said. "I stay here and surveil this place. If someone does come, we have to be watching: it may be our only chance to learn anything."
"Don't be silly, Son," I said. "You're a stranger here."
"Which makes him the only one of us Mr. X can't know anything about," Nika said. Arguing with me came naturally to her.
Jesse nodded eagerly. "I haven't even used my credit card since I left New York, Dad. My car was pre-rented, and the company paid for it. Unless he checked every airline flight for the last few days to see if by any chance any of your relatives is in town, I'm invisible. Would any of your immediate neighbors put me up for a night without asking too many questions?"
In spite of myself I saw where he was going. "Doug's barn is close to the driveway, and it's warm and dry inside. He won't mind, he's off shooting Harrison Ford."
"Beg pardon?"
"He's a cinematographer. Ford's in town this week."
"I'll see if he left an infrared camera behind."
"Don't take any chances," I said, at the same instant that Nika said "Don't get near this guy." Our combined volume, in a tiny car called Echo, was enough to make all of us jump.
"I won't," Jesse assured us both, suppressing a natural impulse to smile in order to show us how serious he was. "Where is this barn?"
Reluctantly I pointed behind us. "The driveway just before mine on the same side."
"Even better," he said. "He has to go past me to reach your driveway; I'll definitely hear him."
"And you'll be approaching on the opposite side of Russell's house from him," Nika said. "Time's short. Let's go."
They both opened their doors and got out. Only Nika got back in, on the driver's side this time. Jesse was already on his way in the rain. She buckled up.
"Wait—" I began.
"Wish I could," she said, and put it in drive. We turned around in old Milt's driveway, and I just had time to roll down my window and call, "Be careful, Jesse," before we were by him. I wished I'd had the hairs to add, "I love you." I turned to see him out the rear window, and he was gone. It was unsettling, but impressive.