Authors: Jeffery Deaver
Still, he had his in-order paperwork shield. He wasn’t all that sorry. The man stood beside them for a few minutes, rocking from one foot to another. Then wandered away.
The pain within her was far worse than the greenish bruise from the 9-millimeter slug that had punched her belly last night.
“You okay?” Pam asked.
“Not really.”
“Like, you don’t get freaked much.”
No, I don’t, Sachs thought. But I’m freaked now.
The girl twined her red-streaked hair around her fingers, perhaps a tame version of Sachs’s own nervous touch. She looked once more at the ugly square of metal, about three by four feet, sitting amid a half dozen others.
Memories were reeling. Her father and teenage Amelia, sharing Saturday afternoons in their tiny garage, working on a carburetor or clutch. They’d escaped to the back for two reasons—for the pleasure of the mechanical work in each other’s company, and to escape the moody third party in the family: Sachs’s mother.
“Gaps?” he’d asked, playfully testing her.
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“Plug,” teenage Amelia had replied, “is zero three five. Points, thirty to thirty-two dwell.”
“Good, Amie.”
Sachs recalled another time—a date, her first year in college. She and a boy who went by the name of C.T. had met at a burger place in Brooklyn. Their vehicles surprised each other. Sachs in the Camaro—yellow at the time, with tar black stripes for accent—and he atop a Honda 850.
The burgers and sodas vanished fast, since they were only a few miles from an abandoned airstrip and a race was inevitable.
He was off the line first, given that she was inside a ton and a half of vehicle, but her big block caught him before the half mile—he was cautious and she wasn’t—and she steered into the drift on the curves and kept ahead all the way to the finish.
Then her favorite drive of all time: After they’d concluded their first case together, Lincoln Rhyme, largely immobilized, strapped in beside her, windows down and wind howling. She rested his hand on the gearshift knob as she shifted and she remembered him shouting over the slipstream, “I think I can feel it. I think I can!”
And now the car was gone.
Sorry, lady…
Pam climbed down the embankment.
“Where are you going?”
“You shouldn’t go down there, miss.” The owner, outside the office shack, was waving the paperwork like a warning semaphore.
“Pam!”
But she wouldn’t be stopped. She walked up to the mass of metal and dug around inside. She tugged hard and pulled out something, then returned to Sachs.
“Here, Amelia.” It was the horn button emblem, with the Chevrolet logo.
Sachs felt the tears but continued to will them away. “Thanks, honey. Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They drove back to the Upper West Side and stopped for recuperative ice cream; Sachs had arranged for Pam to take the day off from school. She didn’t want her to be around Stuart Everett, and the girl was only too happy to agree.
Sachs wondered if the teacher would take no for an answer. Thinking of the trashy flicks—à la
Scream
and
Friday the 13th
—that she and Pam sometimes watched late at night, fortified with Doritos and peanut butter, Sachs knew that old boyfriends, like horror movie killers, sometimes have a way of rising from the dead.
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Love makes us weird…
Pam finished her ice cream and patted her stomach. “I so needed that.” Then she sighed. “How could I be so stupid?”
In the girl’s ensuing laugh—eerily adult—Amelia Sachs heard what she believed was the final shovel of earth on the grave of the hockey-masked killer.
They left Baskin-Robbins and walked toward Rhyme’s town house, several blocks away, planning a girls’ night out, along with another friend of Sachs’s, a policewoman she’d known for years. She asked the girl, “Movie or play?”
“Oh, a play… Amelia, when does an off-Broadway play become an off-off-Broadway play?”
“That’s a good question. We’ll Google it.”
“And why do they call them Broadway plays when there aren’t any theaters on Broadway?”
“Yeah. They should be ‘near Broadway’ plays. Or ‘right around the corner from Broadway’ plays.”
The pair walked along the east-west side street, approaching Central Park West. Sachs was suddenly aware of a pedestrian nearby. Somebody was crossing the street behind them, moving in their general direction, as if following them.
She felt no alarm, putting the breeze of concern down to the paranoia from the 522 case.
Relax. The perp’s dead and gone.
She didn’t bother to look back.
But Pam did.
And screamed shrilly, “It’s him, Amelia!”
“Who?”
“The guy who broke into your town house. That’s him!”
Sachs spun around. The man in the blue plaid jacket and baseball cap. He moved toward them fast.
She slapped her hip, going for her gun.
Which wasn’t there.
No, no, no…
Since Peter Gordon had fired the weapon, the Glock was now evidence—as was her knife—and both were at Crime Scene Unit in Queens. She hadn’t had the chance to go downtown and do the paperwork for a replacement.
Sachs now froze, recognizing him. It was Calvin Geddes, an employee of Privacy Now. She couldn’t
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make sense of this, and wondered if they’d been wrong. Were Geddes and 522 in on the murders together?
He was now just yards away. Sachs could do nothing but step between Geddes and Pam. She balled her fists up as the man stepped close and reached into his jacket.
The doorbell rang, and Thom went to answer it.
Rhyme heard some heated words from the front entryway. A man’s voice, angry. A shout.
Frowning, he glanced at Ron Pulaski, who had his weapon out of his high-riding holster, and pointed it up, ready to fire. He held it expertly. Amelia Sachs was a good mentor.
“Thom?” Rhyme called.
He didn’t answer.
A moment later a man appeared in the doorway, wearing a baseball cap, jeans and an ugly plaid jacket.
He blinked in shock as Pulaski aimed the gun toward him.
“No! Wait!” the man cried, ducking and lifting a hand.
Then Thom, Sachs and Pam entered immediately behind him. The policewoman saw the weapon and said, “No, no, Ron. It’s okay… He’s Calvin Geddes.”
It took Rhyme a moment to recall. Ah, that’s right: with the Privacy Now organization, and the source of the lead about Peter Gordon. “What’s this all about?”
Sachs said, “He’s the one who broke into my place. It wasn’t Five Twenty-Two.”
Pam nodded, confirming this.
Geddes stepped closer to Rhyme and reached into his jacket pocket and extracted some blue-backed documents. “Pursuant to New York State civil procedure laws, I’m serving you this subpoena in connection with
Geddes et al. versus Strategic Systems Datacorp, Inc.”
He held them out.
“I got one too, Rhyme.” Sachs held up her own copy.
“And I’m supposed to do
what
with those?” Rhyme asked Geddes, who continued to proffer the documents.
The man frowned, then looked down at the wheelchair, aware of Rhyme’s condition for the first time. “I, well—”
“He’s my attorney-in-fact.” Rhyme nodded to Thom, who took the papers.
Geddes began, “I’m—”
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“You mind if we read it?” Rhyme asked acerbically, with a nod toward his aide.
Thom did so, aloud. It was a subpoena requesting all the paper and computer files, notes and other information that Rhyme had in his possession that related to SSD, its Compliance Division and evidence of SSD’s connections with any governmental body.
“She told me about Compliance.” Geddes nodded toward Sachs. “It didn’t make any sense at all.
Something was fishy about it. No way would Andrew Sterling volunteer to work with the government on privacy issues if he didn’t get something big out of the arrangement. He’d fight them tooth and nail. That made me suspicious. Compliance is about something else. I don’t know what. But we’re going to find out.”
He explained that the suit was under federal and state privacy acts and for various civil violations of common law and constitutional rights of privacy.
Rhyme reflected that Geddes and his attorneys would have a pretty pleasant surprise when they had a look at the Compliance dossiers. One of which he just happened to have in a computer not ten feet from where Geddes now stood. And which he would be more than delighted to hand over, given Andrew Sterling’s refusal to help find Sachs after she’d disappeared.
He wondered which would be in worse trouble, Washington or SSD, when the press learned of the Compliance operation.
Dead heat, he concluded.
Sachs then said, “Of course, Mr. Geddes here will have to juggle the case with his own trial.” Giving him a dark look. She was referring to the break-in at her town house in Brooklyn, whose mission presumably was to find information about SSD. She explained that, ironically, it had been Geddes, not 522, who’d dropped the receipt that had led her to SSD. He regularly hung out at the coffee shop in Midtown, from which he kept up a furtive surveillance of the Gray Rock, noting the comings and goings of Sterling and other employees and customers.
Geddes said fervently, “I’ll do whatever’s necessary to stop SSD. I don’t care what happens to me. I’ll happily be the sacrificial lamb if it brings back our individual rights.”
Rhyme respected his moral courage but decided he needed more quotable lines.
The activist began to lecture them now—reiterating much of what Sachs had reported earlier—about the arachnid sweep of SSD and other data miners, the death of privacy in the country, the risk to democracy.
“Okay, we’ve got the paperwork,” Rhyme interrupted the tiresome rant. “We’ll have a little talk with our own lawyers and, if they say everything’s in order, I’m sure you’ll be getting a care package by your deadline.”
The doorbell rang. Once, twice. Then loud knocking.
“Oh, brother. Goddamn Grand Central Station… What now?”
Thom went to the door. He returned a moment later with a short, confident-looking man in a black suit
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and white shirt. “Captain Rhyme.”
The criminalist turned his wheelchair to face Andrew Sterling, whose calm green eyes registered no surprise whatsoever at the criminalist’s condition. Rhyme suspected that his own Compliance dossier documented the accident and his life afterward in considerable detail, and that Sterling would have boned up on the particulars before he arrived here.
“Detective Sachs, Officer Pulaski.” He nodded to them, then returned to Rhyme.
Behind him were Sam Brockton, the SSD Compliance director, and two other men, who were dressed conservatively. Neat hair. They could have been congressional aides or corporate middle managers, though Rhyme was not surprised to learn they were lawyers.
“Hello, Cal,” Brockton said, looking over Geddes wearily. The Privacy Now man glared back.
Sterling said in a soft voice, “We found out what Mark Whitcomb did.” Despite his diminutive stature, Sterling was imposing in person, with the vibrant eyes, the perfectly straight posture, the unflappable voice. “I’m afraid he’s out of a job. For starters.”
“Because he did the right thing?” Pulaski snapped.
Sterling’s face continued to show no emotion. “And I’m afraid too the matter’s not over with yet.” A nod to Brockton.
“Serve them,” the Compliance director snapped to one of the attorneys. The man handed out his own batch of blue-backed documents.
“More?”
Rhyme commented, nodding at the second set of paperwork. “All this reading. Who’s got the time?” He was in a good mood, still elated that they’d stopped 522 and that Amelia Sachs was safe.
The sequel turned out to be a court order forbidding them to give Geddes any computers, disks, documents or any material of any kind relating to the Compliance operation. And to turn over to the government any such material in their possession.
One hired gun said, “Failure to do so will subject you to civil and criminal penalties.”
Sam Brockton offered, “And believe me, we will pursue all remedies available to us.”
“You can’t do this,” Geddes said, angry. His eyes shone and sweat dotted his dark face.
Sterling counted the computers in Rhyme’s lab. There were twelve. “Which one has the Compliance dossier that Mark sent you, Captain?”
“I forget.”
“Did you make any copies?”
Rhyme smiled. “Always back up your data. And store it in a separate, secure location. Off site. Isn’t that the message of the new millennium?”
Brockton said, “We’ll just get another order to confiscate everything and search all the servers you’ve
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uploaded data to.”
“But that’ll take time and money. And who knows what could happen in the meantime? E-mails or envelopes might get sent to the press, say. Accidentally, of course. But it could happen.”
“This has been a very trying time for everyone, Mr. Rhyme,” Sterling said. “No one’s in the mood for games.”
“We’re not playing games,” Rhyme said evenly. “We’re negotiating.”
The CEO gave what appeared to be his first genuine smile. He was on his home turf now and he pulled up a chair next to Rhyme. “What do you want?”
“I’ll give you everything. No court battles, no press.”
“No!” Geddes was enraged. “How can you cave in?”
Rhyme ignored the activist as efficiently as Sterling did and continued, “Provided you get my associates’
records cleared up.” He explained about Sellitto’s drug test and Pulaski’s wife.
“I can do that,” Sterling said as if it were no more trouble than turning up the volume on a TV.
Sachs said, “And you have to fix Robert Jorgensen’s life too.” She told him about how 522 had virtually destroyed the man.
“Give me the details and I’ll make sure it’s taken care of. He’ll have a clean slate.”
“Good. As soon as everything’s cleared up you’ll have what you want. And nobody will see a single piece of paper or file about your Compliance operation. I give you my word.”