The Silent Corner Page 4

  When she’d sold her house, when she’d converted everything she owned into cash and stashed it where it could not easily be found, she had thought “the duration” might be six months. Now, two months into this journey and almost three thousand miles from where it had begun, she no longer had the false confidence to put a tentative end date to the mission.

  She pulled away from the curb, inserting the Ford into a river of vehicles. In nearly every case, each car and SUV and truck and bus was continuously signaling its position for the benefit of commercial collectors of megadata, police agencies—and whoever owned the future.

  14

  * * *

  THE NEW San Diego Central Library—either a postmodern triumph or a regrettable hodgepodge, depending on your taste—had nearly half a million square feet spread over nine floors, making it too big for Jane’s purposes. Its spaces were too thoroughly surveilled for her comfort, and too difficult to exit with alacrity and stealth in an emergency. She went in search of an older branch library.

  She had disposed of her laptop weeks earlier. These days, they served as locaters no less than did a vehicle’s GPS. Her preferred computer source was a public library, wherever she might be. Even then, depending on the information she sought and reviewed online, she didn’t linger long at any location.

  She found a branch in the Spanish-mission style, derivative but honest architecture with a barrel-tile roof, palest-yellow stucco walls, windows with bronze frames and muntins. Thriving banana palms sculled the air with their large paddlelike fronds, as if to row the building backward in time to a more serene era.

  The parking area serving the library also abutted a park with winding paths, a picnic area, and a playground. As had become her habit, Jane drove past her destination and curbed the car on a side street a block and a half away. After removing a small notebook, a pen, and a wallet, she tucked her purse under the seat before she got out and locked the doors.

  Inside the branch library, there were many more aisles of books than there were of computers. She chose a workstation two removed from one occupied by a surly-looking street person whose presence assured that other patrons would avoid that entire quadrant of computers.

  Wild witches’ broom of dark hair, street-corner-prophet beard bristling and woven through with a white streak as though stiffened and selectively bleached by a lightning bolt, wearing lace-up boots and camouflage pants and green flannel shirt and voluminous black quilted-nylon jacket, the hulking man had apparently defeated the library’s block on obscene websites and was watching pornography with the sound off.

  He didn’t so much as glance at Jane, and he didn’t fondle himself. He sat with his hands on the tabletop, and he considered the action on the screen with something like boredom and with what seemed to be puzzlement. There were drugs, such as Ecstasy, that if taken in too great a quantity for too long caused the brain to stop producing natural endorphins, so that you could no longer experience rapture, joy, or a sense of well-being without chemical assistance. Perhaps that might be his condition, because his sun-seared and weathered face remained without expression as he stared with the stillness and apparent incomprehension of a sculpture of a man.

  Online, Jane searched for and found the Gernsback Institute, which produced the annual What If Conference, among other events. Its stated purpose was to “inspire the imagination of leaders in business, science, government, and the arts for the purpose of encouraging informed speculation in search of outside-the-box solutions to significant problems facing humanity.”

  Do-gooders. For people with malicious intentions, no better cover existed than a nonprofit organization dedicated to bettering the human condition. Most of the people at the institute might in fact mean well and be doing good, but that didn’t mean they grasped the hidden intentions of its founders or their core mission.

  In the notebook, she recorded data that seemed most pertinent to her investigation. She used numerical and alphabetical codes of her own devising, so that this information was in a form that no one but she would be able to read. Now she entered the coded names of the officers and nine board members of the institute, only one of which—David James Michael—rang in her memory.

  David James Michael. The man with three first names. He was somewhere else in this compilation of names, dates, and places. She would pore through it later to find him.

  Having bumped out of the porn site, the homeless man now watched dog videos on YouTube, again with the speakers muted, his hands resting on each side of the keyboard, his time-beaten face as expressionless as a clock.

  After she logged off and pocketed her notebook and pen, Jane got to her feet, moved nearer to the guy, and put a pair of twenty-dollar bills on the table beside his computer. “Thank you for your service to the country.”

  He looked up at her as if she had spoken in a language unknown to him. His eyes were not bloodshot, neither were they bleary from booze, but gray and clear and keenly observant.

  When he said nothing, she indicated the tattoo on the back of his right hand: a blue spearhead as background, within which was a complete raised sword in gold bisected by three golden lightning bolts, the insignia of Army Special Forces Airborne, and under that the letters DDT. “Can’t have been light duty.”

  Nodding toward the forty dollars, he said, “There’s them who need it more than me.” He had the voice of a bear with strep throat.

  “But I don’t know them,” she said. “I’d be grateful if you gave it to them for me.”

  “I can do that.” He did not pick up the money, but turned his attention once more to the dog videos. “There’s a free kitchen near here that can always use donations.”

  Jane didn’t know if she had done the right thing, but it was the only thing she could have done.

  As she left the alcove where the computers were arrayed, she glanced back, but he was not looking at her.

  15

  * * *

  STILL, THE STORM had not broken. The sky over San Diego loomed heavy with midday dark, as if all the water weight and potential thunder stored over distant Alpine had in the last few hours slid unspent toward the city, to add pressure to the coastal deluge that was coming. Sometimes both weather and history broke far too slowly for those who were impatient for what came next.

  In the park adjacent to the library, following a winding path, she saw ahead a fountain surrounded by a reflecting pool, and she walked to it and sat on one of the benches facing the water that flowered up in numerous thin streams, petaling the air with silver droplets.

  The park was sparsely populated for the hour, only half a dozen people in sight, two of them walking dogs less leisurely than they might have under a more benevolent sky.

  Jane took her case notebook from an inner sport-coat pocket, paged to the growing list of names, and found a previous entry for David James Michael. He was the man who, as she’d discovered in her recent library session, sat on the board of the Gernsback Institute that organized the invitation-only What If Conference attended by Gordon and Gwyn Lambert, now both dead by their own hands.

  The notation after the first listing for Michael referred her to the suicide of a T. Quinn Eubanks in Traverse City, Michigan. Eubanks, a man of inherited wealth and considerable personal achievement, had sat on the board of directors of three charitable foundations, including the Seedling Fund, where one of his fellow directors was David James Michael.

  Her next line of inquiry was now clear, or as clear as anything got in this case.

  First, however, she had to make a call to Chicago.

  At all times she carried a disposable phone with prepaid minutes. As far as she knew, disposables had never been trackable. Even if such bargain models now emitted identifying signals, she always bought them with cash and needed no ID to activate service.

  A bevy of uniformed schoolgirls hurried past in response to the mother-quail urgings of a nun in a contemporary habit, who seemed to think the storm would break at any moment.

 
The air was yet too still. Like tectonic plates, a mass of cool air and a warmer mass would strike-slip and throw down a sudden rush of wind, and the downpour would come a minute or two after that.

  Confident of her atmospheric intuition—and not wanting to use the phone while in the car, where she could be trapped in the event that she was wrong about the security of a disposable cell—Jane extracted her current phone from an interior jacket pocket and entered the number for Sidney Root’s direct line.

  Sidney’s wife, Eileen, had been the Chicago-based advocate for the rights of people with disabilities about whom Jane had told Gwyneth Lambert. Eileen Root suffered a first and last migraine headache while away from home at a seminar, and three weeks later hung herself in the garage of the family home.

  Like Jane’s husband, Sidney’s wife left a note before killing herself, an even more disturbing, cryptic message than Nick’s: Sweet Sayso says he’s lonely all these years, why did Leenie stop needing him, he was always there for Leenie, now I need to be there for him.

  Neither Sidney nor his and Eileen’s—Leenie’s—three children, who were all in their twenties, had ever heard of a man named Sayso.

  Jane had traveled to Chicago and met with Sidney Root soon after being granted leave from the Bureau, early in her unofficial investigation, before she discovered that because of such inquiries, she would be targeted by a mysterious conspiracy as elusive as a confederacy of ghosts. She had used her real name then; and of necessity she used it now when he answered on the third ring.

  “Oh, yes, I tried to call you a few days ago,” he said, “but the number you gave me was out of service.”

  “I moved, went through a lot of changes,” she said, which was as much explanation as she would give him. “But I’ve still got this monkey on my back, you know, still looking for an explanation, and I hoped you might spare me a few minutes.”

  “Sure. Just let me close my office door.” He was an architect in a large practice with four partners. He put her on hold, and a few seconds later returned. “Okay. What can I do for you?”

  “I know the world of nonprofits is enormous, and it was your wife who moved in those circles, not you so much, but do you recall Eileen talking about something called the Gernsback Institute?”

  He thought a moment but then said, “Means nothing.”

  “What about the Seedling Fund?”

  “That neither.”

  “Now a couple of names. David James Michael?”

  “Mmmmm…sorry, no.”

  “Quinn Eubanks?”

  “I’m not always good with names.”

  “The seminar in Boston where Eileen had the migraine—you said that event was a presentation of Harvard University.”

  “Yes. You can look it up.”

  “I did. But I’m wondering if she attended any other conference shortly before or after that one.”

  “Eileen was passionate about her work. She had a busy schedule. I can’t recall, but I could find out for you.”

  “I’d be grateful, Sidney. Say by this time tomorrow?”

  “You really do still have that monkey on your back.”

  “Don’t forget those suicide statistics I gave you.”

  “I remember. But as I told you at the time—look around at all the craziness in the world, all the violence and hatred these days, the economic crises, and you don’t need any other explanation for why more people would be more depressed than ever.”

  “Except that Eileen wasn’t depressed.”

  “Well, no. But—”

  “And neither was Nick.”

  “She wasn’t depressed,” Sidney said, “but that’s what I tried to call you about the other day. You remember the note she left?”

  Jane quoted the opening of it from memory: “ ‘Sweet Sayso says he’s lonely all these years….’ ”

  “We didn’t share the contents widely at first,” Sidney said, “because…well, because it was so strange, not like Eileen. We didn’t want people to remember her as…mentally ill, I guess. Recently, her only living aunt, Faye, found out about the note and solved the mystery. Sort of. For a while when Eileen was four and five, she had an imaginary friend named Sayso. She talked to him, made up stories about him. Like that kind of thing always does, it passed. Who knows why at the end she would flash back to that?”

  Jane shivered at the idea of a long-forgotten imaginary friend calling a fifty-year-old woman to join him in death, though if she’d been asked to explain the chill, she couldn’t have done so.

  “How are you doing?” Sidney asked.

  “Good enough. I don’t sleep well.”

  “Me neither. Sometimes, if I snore myself awake, I apologize to her for the noise. I mean out loud. I forget she’s not there.”

  “I’ve been traveling a lot, staying in motels,” she said, “and I can’t sleep in a double bed. Nick was a big guy. So it has to be queen- or king-size. Otherwise, it’s like admitting he’s gone, and I don’t sleep at all.”

  “Are you still on leave from the Bureau?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Take my advice, go back to work. Real work, instead of chasing an explanation for something that can’t ever be fully explained.”

  “Maybe I will,” she lied.

  “I don’t mean to noodge, but work has helped me.”

  “Maybe I will,” she lied again.

  “Give me your new phone number so I can call you when I find out if Eileen was at another conference around that time.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said. “Thanks, Sidney. You’re a peach.”

  When she hung up, she appeared to be the only person remaining in the park. The lawns and pathways were deserted to the limits of vision. Not one pigeon strutting. Not one scurrying squirrel.

  At the wrong time, in the wrong place, a city could be as isolate as the Arctic.

  On the flanking streets to the north and south, traffic passed: grumble of engines, swish of tires, hiss of air brakes, occasional bleat of horn, rattle of a loosely fit manhole cover. Even as she stepped away from the sizzle of the spritzing fountain, the traffic noise seemed curiously muffled, as if the park were enclosed with insulated dual-pane glass.

  The air remained calm under pressure, the sky full of iron-dark mountains that would soon collapse in a deluge, the city expectant, the windows of buildings shimmering with light that normally would be faded by the sun at this hour, drivers switching on headlights, the vehicles gliding through the faux dusk like submersibles following undersea lanes.

  Jane had taken only a few steps from the fountain when she detected a buzz like swarming wasps. At first it seemed to come from above her, and then from behind, but when she turned in a circle and faced again the grove of palms toward which she had been moving, she saw the source hovering twenty feet away: a drone.

  16

  * * *

  THE HIGH-END CIVILIAN-MODEL quadcopter drone, a small fraction of the size of any military version, resembled a miniature unmanned moon lander combined with an insect. It appeared similar to the DJI Inspire 1 Pro, though somewhat larger, about seven thousand dollars’ worth of aeronautics. These were used by real-estate companies to film for-sale properties and were increasingly put to work by many other commercial enterprises. They were also favored by well-heeled hobbyists who ranged from legitimate drone enthusiasts to the contemporary equivalent of Peeping Toms.

  Hovering only eight or ten feet off the ground, in the shadows under the cascading crowns of the phoenix palms, it was an effigy of the feared machine god of a thousand movies and stories, a lighter-than-air menace with heavy-as-a-sledgehammer impact that sent a jolt of fear through her. The craft was in violation of all the rules applying to civilian drone use, at least as Jane knew them.

  She didn’t imagine that its presence here could be a mere coincidence. Its three-axis gimbaled camera remained trained on her.

  Somehow she’d given them her location. What her mistake might have been did not matter right no
w; she could work that out later.

  If a backup battery provided the craft with twice the flight time of an Inspire 1 Pro, it could remain in the air for half an hour to forty minutes. Which meant it must have been launched from somewhere in the vicinity, most likely from a surveillance van.

  The drone operator would monitor her until enough officers arrived to arrest her. Or maybe they weren’t from a legitimate law-enforcement agency, in which case there would be no officers, and they would just…take her. They were after her. The omnipotent, almost mystical They. But she had no idea who They might be.

  In any case, they were already near.

  The park still appeared deserted. Not for long.

  She didn’t try to run at once, but instead moved toward the drone when she saw something about it that required taking a better look. Her boldness allowed her to detect, sooner than she would have otherwise, that this either was not a civilian model or had been radically customized in the aftermarket. Maybe the storm light and the shadows misled her, although she knew they didn’t, and maybe in her paranoia she conjured out of innocent shapes the presence of a sound suppressor wrapping the narrow bore of a muzzle, but she knew that paranoia had nothing to do with it.

  The drone had been weaponized.

  As the machine drifted toward her, she dodged to one side, behind the thick bole of a phoenix palm. Had she turned and run at once, she would have been shot in the back.

  In that brief and desperate moment of cover, she drew the Heckler & Koch from her shoulder rig.

  Her mind raced, trying to grasp the threat to its fullest nature. The problem of weight mitigated against a civilian-style drone being converted to a weapon with a high-capacity magazine. Without a gun, the average craft—with camera and battery—weighed about eight pounds. The weight of artillery and ammo would affect stability and greatly reduce flight time. So it would have to be a low-caliber weapon loaded with but a few rounds, and she doubted it would be accurate.