The master bedroom is at the front of the residence, the only upstairs room with light.
When he steps through the open door, he finds a vestibule and beyond it the larger chamber, everything in shades of peach with pale-green accents. In matching green pajamas, perfectly coordinated with her elegant surroundings, Colleen is propped against a pile of pillows, her book having slipped from her hands into her lap when she fell asleep. She is a beautiful woman who is aging well and will no doubt be still quite lovely in her eighties. Or would have been.
He’s tempted to wake her to see what their conversation might be like. He suspects that she’ll be as cool a customer as her husband, and amusing. Time is not running out, but it is of the essence, so he shoots her twice in the chest, leaving her face untouched. As she makes an instantaneous transition from mere sleep to eternity, her expression becomes grievous, but only briefly, and then once more she looks as if she is only dreaming.
FIGHT OR FLIGHT
Maybe they’re safe and no one knows where they are, but they feel as watched as if they’re in a fishbowl. The windows feature motorized shades, with a hand control in every room. “I’ll shut them throughout the ground floor,” Nina declares as she powers down the shades in the large kitchen. The front door can be locked, though anyone can disengage the deadbolt by reaching through the pane that Michael shattered. “We’ll use a chair as a brace, pile lots of noisy things on it,” she says, and hurries off with the boy in tow.
Michael stares at the transponder packed into the hollowed-out stack of twenties. Woodbine put it here, of course, to find his cash in the unlikely event that someone took it out of the Bentley. The sedan’s GPS navigation was turned off, so the vehicle hasn’t been trackable that way, but this transponder has been painting a target on Michael for twenty-one hours, since he took the sedan. In all that time, a man with the attorney’s resources—including a small army of murderous drug dealers and his cozy relationship with the ISA—should have found him, killed him, and retrieved the Bentley. He isn’t fool enough to believe that luck has spared him, that the transponder has gone dead. For some other reason, the attorney has been unable to find him.
He recalls the conversation that he’d heard between Durand and Julian Grantworth, which the deputy director of the ISA had recorded in a restaurant while the agent was at dinner. If Durand went to the offices of Woodbine, Kravitz, Benedetto, and Spackman as scheduled—more than four hours ago—the frustrated attorney would surely have told him about the hidden transponder. Otherwise, Woodbine would seem to have no reason to turn to the ISA and call in a favor they owed him. If the transponder problem was something like a range-of-transmission issue related to the app that linked it to Woodbine’s phone, whatever, the ISA possessed search resources immeasurably greater than any the attorney could muster. The agency would have located the signal in short order. The ISA is like an ineradicable fungus that has spoored across the country over fifteen years. Their desire to snatch Michael and imprison or kill him is more powerful and urgent than Woodbine’s petty desire to recover his three million dollars and exact revenge. Michael is the most wanted man in the country. At any moment in the past two hours, having pinpointed the transponder, the ISA should have sent a tsunami of agents crashing down on him. Instead, nothing. Nothing yet.
Calaphas. He’s the assigned agent, the main man on the scene at Beautification Research five days earlier. He is Javert to Michael’s Jean Valjean.
While at the house in Corona del Mar, Michael planted triggers in the ISA system to inform him any time that his name and that of Calaphas appeared within two hundred characters of each other in written reports or within thirty seconds of each other in recorded statements or conversations. Having received no alerts since coming south from there, he’s assumed that the agent has made no progress.
He possesses the GPS identifier of Calaphas’s smartphone and has previously intruded into that device to explore the agent’s contacts. Now he goes online, enters Verizon’s system, where he has been before, and finds that phone’s locating signal. Calaphas seems to be nowhere near Rancho Santa Fe, at an address near the southern end of Los Angeles County, perhaps two and a half hours from here.
Seems to be. The phone is not the person. If Calaphas has been accurately speculating on Michael’s extraordinary abilities, he is likely to have concluded that he shouldn’t be carrying a phone that can establish his location and allow his quarry to follow his every move. If he is now carrying a phone that is not linked to his name, Michael has no way of finding him—but Calaphas may well be able to track the transponder in this brick of twenty-dollar bills. In fact, even Pollyanna wouldn’t be so illogically optimistic as to think that Calaphas could not do so.
Michael reaches for the transponder, intending to hammer it into ruin—but hesitates. He looks at the shades that cover all the kitchen windows, and he wonders if Calaphas could be out there now, watching the house, waiting for backup. Or perhaps backup has already arrived, and a score of ISA agents are currently taking up positions. The moment the transponder ceases transmitting, they will conclude it’s been found, and they might accelerate whatever assault they have planned.
In a fraction of a minute, Michael reviews the extensive ISA file on Calaphas, which was earlier downloaded into the vast data-storage capacity of Shadow Michael and is his to pore through at high speed. Calaphas the manageable sociopath. His utter lack of conscience. His great pleasure in the application of extreme force. The murder of his brother. His numerous sanctioned killings. The atrocities he’s committed and for which he has been granted clemency in the course of his career include the brutal execution not only of his targets but on some occasions also of the spouses and children.
In most assignments, Calaphas has acted alone. It’s apparent why. In the company of sane agents, he is to some degree restrained, less able to indulge in his taste for barbarous cruelty. His history suggests why a platoon hasn’t descended on Michael. Calaphas intends to come after him alone. And the monster is most likely en route to Rancho Santa Fe and closing fast. Or already here.
DEEP INTO THE DARKNESS PEERING
Returning to his agency sedan, where the arc of eucalyptus trees faintly rustles even in the post-storm stillness, Calaphas retrieves the loaded AR-15 and three spare magazines. He doubts he will expend so many rounds, but when he goes hunting, he likes to know that he possesses far more firepower than his prey. He takes the ATN PVS7-3 night-vision goggles—Mil-Spec, Generation 4 gear—and hangs them around his neck in case he needs them later.
He pops another bennie from the blister pack. The first bennie is still cranking his engine. He doesn’t really need a second, but he’s very excited about this kill, this game-winning kill. He wants to be wired when he takes out Michael Mace. He feels everything more intensely when he’s wired. He doesn’t often take drugs, certainly not every time that he kills someone; such frequency would lead to addiction. He isn’t a recreational user. It’s about increasing the pleasure he takes from his work and therefore doing a better job. Doing a perfect job is how he’s going to get out of the game and into a higher level of life. He can tolerate a second five-milligram dose. He’s done it before. He never suffers tremors or confusion, and the stuff doesn’t make him talkative like it does most people. It just makes him hyper alert and eager for action. Yes, it can make him irritable, and it always heightens his aggression, but those aren’t necessarily bad effects. He puts the tablet under his tongue.