Ashley Bell Page 10

  “What? No. Of course not.”

  “So I asked myself, did they come here more than a day ago and hide out in the building? Are they still hiding in the building?”

  “Why would they do that?” she asked.

  “Damn if I know.” He shrugged and looked bewildered, pretending for a moment to be without suspicion. “So we searched the place, end to end. Nada. Zip.” He walked past her to stare out the window. Head tipped back. Pondering the sky. “It makes me feel stupid, you know? So I kept looking at the same scrap of video till I noticed something weird. Want to guess what it was?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Still at the window with his back to her, Chubb Coy said, “When the guy and the dog come along, they pass two other people going the opposite direction. A nurse. Then an orderly. Neither one glances at Mr. Hoodie. Kind of peculiar, huh? That hour, the hoodie, and not even a glance? But stranger still, here’s this beautiful dog at four in the morning, and they don’t glance at it, either. People see a beautiful dog, they stare, they smile. Most want to pet it, ask the owner its name. They’re off-duty now, the nurse and the orderly, so I called them. Both swear there wasn’t a dog. They’re adamant. They never passed a dog in the hallway. You know what I’m wondering now?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” Bibi said. “I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

  He turned from the window to face her. “I don’t know how it’s possible, but just about anything is these days, when it comes to fiddling with digital recordings, sound or image. So I’m wondering if some hacker breached our security archives, somehow inserted Mr. Hoodie and the dog in our video, made them be where they never were.”

  Perplexed, Bibi said, “Who’d go to all that trouble? And why?”

  Instead of answering her, Chubb Coy said, “Watching it about a hundred times, I still can’t see any technical giveaway. The guy and the dog register with the same clarity as the nurse and orderly. The light plays off them exactly as it does other people in the scene. But I’m no expert. A first-rate techie specialist, an analyst with the right credentials, should be able to prove it’s a fraud.”

  “Except for one thing you seem to have forgotten,” Bibi reminded him. “I saw them. The man, the dog. They came into my room. The dog stood on its hind feet, put its front paws on my bed. Those lovely luminous gold eyes. It licked my hand.” She held up her left hand, as though a residue of case-closing golden-retriever DNA might still be found between her fingers.

  The security chief’s blue-flecked steel-gray eyes were to him as scalpels to a surgeon. Direct and sharp and intent on cutting through all deception, his gaze seemed to flense her with exquisite delicacy, peeling away the layers of her image in a search for the most artful chicanery, some subtle telltale, that would put the lie to everything he’d been told.

  “These days,” he said in a dead-flat voice from which he took care to bleed all inflection, “I may be just a glorified mall cop, in a somewhat more respectable environment, but I was once the real thing, and I still have good gumshoe instincts.”

  Regarding him with growing amazement and uneasiness, Bibi asked, “What are you saying?”

  “I’m not saying anything, Miss Blair.”

  “That I’m some kind of suspect?”

  He raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes in an unconvincing pretense of surprise, as if she had misinterpreted what he’d said and had leaped to a conclusion about his intentions that astonished him.

  “What am I supposed to have done?” she asked, not with offense or anger, but with a kind of amused bafflement. “Faked the remission of my cancer? Tricked the MRI machine? Deceived all my doctors? Does any of that make sense?”

  If the irrepressible joy she felt as a result of her recovery had not been still so fresh in Bibi’s heart, the security chief’s smug smile would have ticked her off.

  “That old cop intuition, Miss Blair, it’s like poison ivy. It just itches and itches, you can’t ignore it, so you have to scratch it real good to get relief.”

  With those words, which Bibi took to be a promise or even a threat, Chubb Coy headed for the door.

  She said, “Try some calamine lotion. It has a funny smell and it’s lady-pink, but it relieves the itching.”

  Without glancing back, Coy left the room.

  The soft laugh that escaped Bibi had only a slight nervous edge. She said, “Looney-Toon.”

  Throughout the morning and the afternoon of their first day on the roof of the three-story building, the four members of the SEAL team used periscopic cameras with nonreflective zoom lenses to scan the dead village without much risk that sunlight, flaring off the glass, would betray their presence. The images transmitted to the display screens were crisp, clear, and tedious. When the sun moved west but not directly behind Paxton and his men, they were bold enough to poke just their heads above the parapet to study the townscape: a drab gray-and-sand-brown hodgepodge of characterless structures, bullet-pocked stucco, cracked and crumbling concrete, and iron security gates hanging useless from broken hinges, strewn through with rubble.

  Their target, the Ghost, whose name was Abdullah al-Ghazali, was holed up somewhere in these grim ruins, and he had with him six acolytes, all true believers, two of them possibly women. He had chosen to hide in this town, whose population he had slaughtered seventeen months earlier, perhaps because he thought it was the last place anyone would look for him, but perhaps because the atmosphere of an abattoir appealed to the bastard, surrounded as he was with memories of vicious cruelties and abhorrent violence, which he found delectable. Paxton had studied the culture that produced such men, but a lifetime of study would not help him understand why they became death-loving haters of everything the rest of humanity held dear.

  An equal-opportunity terrorist who murdered not only Jews and Christians and Hindus and those who had no faith, Abdullah al-Ghazali also butchered Arab tribes other than his own, Muslims he considered less than pure. He claimed to have taken—or ordered taken—the lives of ten thousand people, and most experts thought he had undercounted.

  He usually moved with impunity through countries impressed by his barbarism, but not since the past October. In spite of Homeland Security and no-fly lists and surveillance of every transportation system coast to coast, he had gotten into the States, activated ten sleeper cells, planned two attacks—led one—on shopping malls, and murdered 317 people. Most of his associates had been killed or arrested, but he had escaped the United States, only to find that he was now too hot to be welcomed in those kingdoms and fake democracies that had once provided him with rent-free villas when he needed them.

  Pax, Danny, Gibb, and Perry had been sent to provide justice, which in this case did not require a judge and jury. Now that they were in town, they were eager to do the job and go home, impatient with the need to conceal their presence until the targets revealed themselves, instead of boldly going on the search.

  Later in the afternoon, only half a block away, a man appeared on the flat, railed roof of a two-story building on the farther side of the street. Although he was dressed in gray to match the concrete around him, his camouflage was pathetic. A pair of binoculars hung around his neck. The SEALs at once put down their field glasses and ducked out of sight.

  Perry raised a camera on its stick, so that it barely cleared the parapet wall. The instrument was so small, there was little danger that the watchman would spot it. Perry and Pax lay with the display between them, watching an enhanced image of the terrorist. Not Abdullah. One of his butt-kissers. The guy lit a cigarette and took two draws before raising his binoculars to survey this jumping-off place that he and his companions used as their rats’ nest.

  Having put up a second camera, Gibb and Danny huddled over that display. Four men scoping the scene, analyzing the smoker’s behavior, were better than two. Each might see a crucial detail that the others missed. For starters, Pax figured the six targets must feel safe if one surfaced only periodically to perform a cursory surveillance o
f the town. Maybe their edge had worn off because they were doing good dope, which, among their teetotaling kind, was a common indulgence. Mass murder was stressful. They had to chill out somehow, after all.

  Three hundred seventeen shoppers. Ten thousand victims. Back when Muammar Qadhafi had ruled Libya, the Ghost had done an American-TV interview from a villa there, in which he’d said—in addition to the usual propagandist rant—that he possessed a small collection of severed heads in one of his residences. The heads, he declared in his taunting manner, were much like books on a shelf, each one a story. He wished that he had a library large enough to hold ten thousand.

  Throughout the day, Pax had thought often about Bibi, worried about her, wondered about the vivid image of her that had thrust into his mind the night before. Now she receded to a back corner of his thoughts.

  A job needed to be done. He and his guys would do it as well as it could be done and with considerable satisfaction.

  Nancy and Murphy didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and as usual when torn by conflicting emotions, they succumbed to both, switching back and forth, and back again, from tears of joy to tears that watered a large garden of what-might-have-happened fears. They made such a spectacle of themselves in the hospital room that a nurse stepped in and politely asked them to remember, please, that the other patients needed peace and quiet.

  As soon as Bibi had the discharge papers, her parents shepherded her along the corridor, into the elevator, down to the lobby, out to the parking lot, both of them often talking at the same time. They had a thousand questions, and they wanted to hear everything that had happened, but they weren’t able to stop themselves from interrupting her with hugs and kisses and exclamations of relief, some in surfer lingo—“epic, foffing, totally sacred, just a pure glasshouse pipe of a day, stylin’ ”—which for the first time sounded wrong coming from them, as though their daughter’s flirtation with Death had made them desperate to be young again.

  Dinner had to be special, celebratory, a night to be remembered forever, an amped-up commemoration of the impossible become possible. Bibi knew too well what that meant: the best combination Mexican-and-burger joint in town, where cheese came on everything and the spices were hot hot hot, too many bottles of icy Corona, too many shots of tequila. But she went along with the plan because she was hungry, happy, still afloat on wonder, and because she loved her mom and dad. They were always sweet, always amusing, and they weren’t alcoholics, only special-occasion drunks once a month or so.

  During the dinner, Nancy whispered in Murphy’s ear and left the table for ten minutes. When she returned, giggling, Murphy whispered in Nancy’s ear. Then he went away for ten minutes. They were clearly conspiring at something, and Bibi half dreaded what it might be. They were generous and thoughtful, but a surfeit of emotion and too much booze could be a wicked combination that motivated them every so often to drop upon their daughter a wildly inappropriate gift.

  To observe the publication of Bibi’s first novel, they had presented her with an illegal tiger cub, which seemed reasonable to them because one of the big cats was a featured player in the book. Of course, she’d contacted animal-welfare authorities, pretended to have found the cub in the park, and made sure that the little fellow went to a first-rate refuge for exotic animals.

  She didn’t want another tiger or, God forbid, an elephant, but she said nothing because nothing she said would stop them once they had agreed on a “perfect gift.” Her parents could hit you with crazy when you least expected it.

  Bibi had drunk little beer and no tequila while convincing Nancy and Murphy that she was keeping pace with them. Now she insisted they couldn’t drive her to her apartment; she would take them home and, in the morning, return their BMW. They snuggled in the backseat as if they were teenagers.

  At the house in Corona del Mar, their attempt to disentangle and clamber out of the car was worthy of Ringling Bros.’ finest trying to exit a joke vehicle the size of a riding lawnmower. Nancy paused in that performance to say, “When you get home, angel girl, just go with it.”

  “Go with what?”

  Grinning, her dad said, “You’ll see.”

  “Oh, no. I didn’t think it would be tonight.”

  “It’s just what you need,” Murphy assured her.

  “What I need, Dad, is a hot bath and bed.”

  “Her name’s Calida Butterfly.”

  “Whose name?”

  He closed the door and bent down with Nancy to grin at Bibi through the front passenger window. The two of them waved and blew kisses, as though she hadn’t been dying just the day before, as if she were eighteen and going off to college. It’ll be what it’ll be, and it had turned out to be some kind of miracle. Even if the good twist might be impossible, inexplicable, Nancy and Murphy would by morning have put all the recent stress and worry behind them, would waste no psychic energy on wondering why or what if. They would grab their boards and hit the beach, so to speak, and respect fate by giving no thought to it until they were slammed by the next thing that would be whatever it would be.

  On the drive to her apartment, Bibi repeatedly reminded herself that, having had her ticket taken away and torn up as she waited on the banks of the River Styx, she should be grateful for every breath and accept every annoyance and frustration with patience. Easier said than done when someone named Calida Butterfly was apparently waiting for you with just what you needed.

  She parked in one of the two spots reserved for her apartment and switched off the headlights, but not the engine. She considered putting down the power windows an inch, to provide ventilation, and sleeping in the car. That was a childish impulse. She hadn’t been a child even through much of her childhood. She shut off the engine, but took no satisfaction in her maturity.

  In the apartment-complex courtyard, in the expectant stillness of the night, the palms and ferns were as motionless as plants in a diorama. Ribbons of steam rose and withered from the heated, eerily illuminated pool, and a young man as sleek as a trout swam laps so effortlessly that his arms sliced from the water only a quiet slish-slish-slish.

  Carrying her drawstring bag and laptop, Bibi climbed the open iron staircase to the long balcony that served the third-floor units. When she came to the door of her apartment, she found it open wide. Beyond the threshold and the shallow foyer, extravagant bouquets of red and white roses dressed the living room, as if a wedding would soon commence, and all the shimmering light issued from candles in glass cups that crowded every surface not occupied by flower vases.

  As Bibi hesitated in the foyer, a woman stepped into view from the right. She wore flat-soled white shoes, white slacks, and a short-sleeved white blouse. She might have been taken for a physical therapist or a dental assistant except for the blue-silk sash that she wore as a belt, the gold-star-on-blue-field silk scarf at her throat, dangling silver earrings, each ear with three hoops of different sizes, and enough expensive-looking bracelets and finger rings to stock a jewelry store. She was an Amazon. Five foot ten. Maybe six feet. Formidable but feminine, with a face reminiscent of Greta Garbo if Greta Garbo had looked a little more like Nicole Kidman. She was about forty, with clear, smooth skin, blond hair cut in a pageboy, and eyes that were blue or green or silver-gray depending on how the quivering candlelight revealed them.

  In a voice both slightly husky and melodious, she said, “I am Calida Butterfly. Welcome to this first day of your new life.”

  Except that her parents were more traditional in some things than they believed themselves to be, except that their beloved and otherwise libertarian surf culture didn’t have much patience for woman-woman or man-man romance, Bibi might have thought that their gift to her would turn out to be her first lesbian experience.

  But of course it was far different from that. She was about to learn why she had survived brain cancer.

  Calida Butterfly traveled with a folding massage table and a small ostrich-skin suitcase. Featuring two compartments, the case could be opened fr
om either side. Half of it contained the lotions, oils, and items related to massage. The other half held things she needed for her second occupation, which she had declined to reveal until she completed working on Bibi’s tense, knotted muscles.

  “If you’re thinking about what comes next,” Calida had said, “you’re not getting the full effect of the massage.”

  “If I’m wondering about what comes next and why you’re being so mysterious,” Bibi had replied, “that won’t relax me, either.”

  “The writer that you are, I guess you’re used to being a kind of dictator, telling the characters in your stories what to do.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Good. It doesn’t work that way with me, either.” Taking off her rings and bracelets, she said, “Now you lie down and be a good girl.”

  Holding a towel across her breasts, wearing only panties, Bibi had done as she was told. Her embarrassment passed quickly because of Calida’s brusque yet reassuring manner. An uneasiness remained, but she couldn’t identify a cause; maybe it was a lingering effect of the cancer scare, the residue of concerns that need no longer worry her.

  The table had a cutout for her face, so that she was looking at her living-room carpet, where reflections of candlelight flowed and wimpled almost like water. “Did you bring all the candles and roses?” Bibi asked as she waited for the massage to begin.

  “Heavens, no. Your parents asked me to have them delivered at the last minute. I can get anything done on a two-hour notice.”

  “How do you manage that?”

  “I have sources. Proprietary information. Now shush.”

  Calida switched on an iPod. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, whose voice was one of the warmest ever recorded, began to sing a soothing medley of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “What a Wonderful World.”