After Death(32)
A Bentley is not a car that anyone would chop, channel, sparkle out with cool details, and convert into a street rod. Besides, this most recent of Woodbine’s Bentleys looks as it did on the showroom floor.
Seconds later, Michael is in the computer of Classic Wheels, in Oxnard. The data display on the windshield isn’t as slick as that of the Rolls-and-Bentley dealership, but he finds what he needs.
In every vehicle with a GPS navigation system, the transponder that communicates with the satellites issues a unique signal. That signal is the car’s—and therefore the owner’s—ID, which is known to the DMV. Law-enforcement agencies may seek to obtain your car’s navigational ID to review the archived history of its travels or to track you relentlessly in real time. State and local police mostly take the trouble of obtaining a court order, though there have been cases in which certain federal agencies have in recent years been of the mindset that the protections of the Constitution do not apply to everyone. Carter Woodbine has had the Bentley’s navigation system reworked so that he can leave it functional for convenience when he is out and about on honest business or can, by flipping a switch, kill the transponder and eliminate satellite tracking of the vehicle. At the moment, it is off the grid and can’t be tracked.
Another alteration involves the clever restructuring of the rear passenger compartment and the trunk. Michael studies the work order and mechanical drawings until he’s certain he understands the changes that have been made.
Because they materially affect the operation of the car and might raise safety issues, these are changes that are required by law to be reported to the DMV. This is the responsibility of the owner, not of the customizer. From Classic Wheels in Oxnard, Michael takes a quick spin to the DMV computer in Sacramento and consults the records there, using the seventeen letters and numbers of the vehicle’s validated registration card, confirming that Woodbine failed to comply with that requirement.
The Bentley has been altered to serve as the attorney’s getaway car if he needs one. Considering his connections to the country’s power structure, it seems unlikely that he will ever be on the run from the law, but his preparation for every eventuality is why he’s prospered in a dangerous business.
The virtual, eerily lighted highways swooping through infinite darkness now fade, and the reality of the garage coalesces around Michael. He returns the Bentley’s registration to the glove box and gets out of the car and goes around to the driver’s side. He settles behind the wheel and starts the engine.
He powers down the window in his door, powers down the window in the front passenger door, raises the lid on the console box, powers up the window in the passenger’s door, powers up the window in the driver’s door, and shuts the lid on the console box, with no delay between each action. As he learned from the records of Classic Wheels, this six-step combination activates the customized feature in the rear passenger compartment; the motorized bench portion of the back seat recedes into the trunk with a soft purr.
Michael gets out of the sedan and opens the rear door. The backrest remains in place, but where the richly upholstered bench had been, there is now revealed a secret six-inch-deep compartment that runs nearly the width of the vehicle and measures about eighteen inches front to back. This contains an AR-15 rifle with four spare magazines and plastic-wrapped packets of hundred-dollar bills. He isn’t prepared to count this sky-is-falling stash, but it’s no less than two million dollars.
Carter Woodbine is certain to have offshore accounts totaling tens of millions, secreted in tax havens that have no extradition treaties with the United States. However, if catastrophe strikes and his political connections collapse, he could suddenly go from being a treasured friend of the high and mighty to a pariah. In that case, he will need this pot of money to get out of the country, slip deep into Central—or even South—America, buy overnight citizenship under a new name in some hellhole dictatorship, and then charter a suitable jet to convey him to a mountainous principality or an island nation where at least a significant part of his wealth is safely stored.
Michael has taken from Woodbine not just five hundred thousand dollars, but perhaps as much as three million when the value of the Bentley and its cache are added to the haul. In service to the furious attorney, exceedingly dangerous men, perhaps numerous and hoping to receive a generous reward, will be on the lookout for this car across Southern California. Nevertheless, at least for the time being, no police or federal agents will be seeking it.
He returns to the house, to the library, to the wine and cheese and crackers, to the striking view of the storm that is comforting in its textured and bracing reality. In spite of the superhuman abilities that have been bestowed on him, he remains unaware that within the hour he will be swept from his refuge into desperate circumstances.
EDEN
Following the three-lane blacktop, Nina knows what the rain and the night conceal. Grassy hills rise in the east, and beyond the hills lies the lesser desert, and beyond the first desert waits the true and more barren desert. To the west is woven a webwork of small cities and suburbs that crowd the shores of the sea, far from LA but bustling with commerce and compulsion, with ecstasy and horror, grace and cruelty, where most people are time ridden and wearier than they might know.
This broad and fertile valley lies between those two worlds, a quiet refuge. She came here once before, eight years earlier, when John was five years old and her parents were a year away from their encounter with a hit-and-run driver. The four of them enjoyed a rare family vacation, three days at a mom-and-pop motel with a swimming pool. The town at the south end of the valley, to which she and John are at the moment headed, is a picturesque mix of Victorian and Spanish architecture, with numerous art galleries and craft shops, in part a farm community—apple orchards, nut orchards—and in part a low-key tourist destination because of the local history and two popular annual festivals.