After Death(31)
“This attorney have any security video of Mace?”
“No. He’s a ghost, as at the lab in the valley. But Santana has a photo from the time of the trial.”
Rudy Santana has a photograph. Maybe it was originally on his phone, where Michael could have found and deleted it. But Santana has now printed it.
Michael scrubbed every photo of himself from every website, from every file and device connected to the internet. He burned links to his past when he incinerated his house and everything in it. As a security consultant, he has long followed his advice to wealthy clients and has been camera shy, although a few hard copies of photos surely exist. However, he has imagined that the ISA, even with its vast resources, will need weeks to find an image suitable to assist them in a nationwide search.
Weeks would give him time to squirrel away somewhere and prepare to do what he feels destined to do. Now, depending on the quality of Santana’s snapshot, Michael might have only a day or two before the ISA is able to share his image with thousands of agents by the old-fashioned expedient of wanted sheets and posters printed with obsolete technology and then distributed by hand.
A realization pivots him from the window. Now that they have so unexpectedly, fortuitously connected him to Carter Woodbine, they must know that he fled Beverly Hills in the attorney’s Bentley. They are able to monitor its unique GPS signal and swiftly track it to its current location, the garage on the top floor of this residence. In fact, they should already be blocking off the street, surrounding the house.
Having died once, Michael has no doubt that he can die again. Although he was reanimated, the next death will be final because it will be so violent that it will put him beyond all possibility of resurrection. His enemies will see to that. He is the Singularity, but the merging of man and machine does not provide immortality; a machine reduced to radioactive melt and scattered scraps of metal cannot be repaired.
From his previous invasion of ISA’s computer system, Michael has imprinted in memory everything in Durand Calaphas’s agency file, including his iPhone number. As he leaves the library, navigates the living room, and takes the stairs to the top floor, he also goes online, into a bottomless sea of microwaves carrying data. Because he already knows the number and GPS signal of Calaphas’s phone, he instantly finds the agent in a Beverly Hills restaurant. He quickly enters that phone, speeds through the list of contacts, and locates the number for Grantworth. By the time he reaches the foyer, he is in the deputy director’s phone, where he accesses CONTACTS and grabs the number for the ISA director, Katherine Ormond-Wattley.
Crossing the foyer into the hall that leads to the garage, he mentally enters Ormond-Wattley’s phone as she’s in the middle of an encrypted discussion with the president’s national security adviser, Pierce Leyton. Michael hears what Katherine Ormond-Wattley says and also hears what she hears after Leyton’s encrypted transmissions are translated into normal English, or into English that’s as normal as Leyton is able to speak it. They’re talking about a cable-network prime-time host whom they would like to destroy professionally if they could do so without seeming to be behind whatever lie about him they might concoct and document with manufactured evidence.
As Michael enters the garage and turns on the lights, he drops through the contacts on Director Kathy’s phone and finds Carter Woodbine’s number. He slides into the agency’s audio archives and listens to the attorney’s initial conversation with the director.
He had taken the half million from Woodbine shortly after three o’clock in the morning, but the attorney hadn’t placed his call to Ormond-Wattley until 1:35 in the afternoon, approximately ten hours later. Strange. On the phone call, Woodbine seeks the assistance of the ISA, not only to recover the money but also to find Michael and determine how the five-story fortress that houses the law offices of Woodbine, Kravitz, Benedetto, and Spackman was penetrated. Stranger still, during the conversation, he never mentions that his Bentley has been stolen, which he must have known hours earlier.
The attorney wants them to find Michael and the money, wants them to grill the thief until all secrets are spilled, but he doesn’t want them looking for the Bentley.
Michael walks around to the back of the sedan. The name of the Bentley dealership and the city in which it’s located are on the complimentary license-plate frame.
He settles in the front passenger seat and pulls the door shut. He pops open the glove box, sorts through the contents, and extracts an envelope containing the validated registration card issued by the DMV.
This is one of those occasions when he is seeking a complex chain of information and doesn’t know exactly where to find all he needs. He must go exploring. Instead of conjuring a self-driving Tesla in his mind’s eye, he imagines the Bentley is able to navigate the microwave connections and data flows of the internet symbolized by labyrinthine layers of superhighways, streets, and alleyways. He doesn’t need to start the engine or put on the seat belt, for neither the car nor he will leave this property. The garage fades. Michael accelerates into the virtual reality of the World Wide Web. In a few seconds, the sedan takes an exit ramp and comes to a halt inside the computer of the car dealership, figuratively speaking.
Michael summons Woodbine’s file from the customer records, and it appears on the windshield as though on a screen. Over the past sixteen years, the attorney has purchased two Rolls-Royces and three Bentleys from this dealership. He paid cash for the third Bentley fourteen months earlier. He didn’t take delivery himself, but had the car shipped directly to a high-end customizer, Classic Wheels, in Oxnard, California.