Glenn Cooper - Library of the Dead aka Secret of the Seventh Son

“Fuck me…”

“They’re downloading the intercept. We should have it in a couple of minutes. Shackleton wants to meet Piper at a coffee shop in Beverly Hills tomorrow morning.”

Frazier clapped his hands together in triumph and yelled, “Two birds with one fucking stone! Thank you, Lord!” He started thinking. “Any outbound calls? How’s she passing the info?”

“No calls from her home line or her cell since this one.”

“Okay, she’s in Georgetown, right? Get a bead on all public phones in a two-mile radius of where she lives and check them for recent calls to other pay phones or prepaid cells. And find out if she has a roommate or a boyfriend and get their numbers and call logs. I want to see a crosshair over Piper’s forehead.”

It was evening in Los Angeles and the heat was starting to dissipate. Mark remained in his bungalow all day with a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. He vowed to do penance for Kerry by fasting but got light-headed in the afternoon and broke into the assortment of salty snacks and cookies at the bar. In any event, he reasoned, what happened to her was meant to happen, so he wasn’t really to blame, was he? The thought made him feel a little better, and he opened a beer. He drank two more in rapid succession, then started on the vodka.

His bungalow had its own private courtyard hidden behind salmon-colored walls inscribed with faux Italianate arches. He ventured out with the bottle, sat on a lounger and reclined. The air was fragrant with the exotic aromas of the tropical garden flowers. He let himself sleep, and when he awoke the sky was black and it had become chilly. He shivered in the night air and never felt more alone.

The Mojave Desert was 112 degrees in the early hours of Saturday morning, and Will thought he might spontaneously incinerate when he pulled the car off the road and emerged for a pee. He prayed the old Taurus would start up again, and it did. He’d make it to Beverly Hills with time to spare.

In the Area 51 Ops Center, Frazier was watching Will’s electronic signature as a yellow dot on a satellite-view map. His last cell phone ping was off a Verizon tower five miles west of Needles on I-40. Frazier liked to limit operational variables and eliminate surprises-the digital hawk-eye view was comforting.

Traditional shoe-leather work led them to Will’s prepaid phone. A Defense Intelligence Agency team in Washington established that Laura’s apartment was rented by a man named Greg Davis. On Friday night Davis’s mobile phone had received and placed calls from a T-Mobile prepaid phone located in White Plains, New York. That T-Mobile phone had only made and received calls from one other number since it was activated, a number corresponding to another T-Mobile prepaid phone moving west through Arizona on Friday night.

It was a trivial leap to Will’s FBI partner, Nancy Lipinski, who lived in White Plains. The DIA tappers put both prepaid lines under surveillance and Frazier had it all, wrapped in ribbon in a bow, like a Christmas present. His men would be at Sal and Tony’s Coffee Shop for a nice Saturday breakfast, and in the meantime he’d watch Will’s yellow dot moving westward at eighty miles per hour and count down the hours till the misery was over.

Will rolled into Beverly Hills just before seven in the morning and did a drive-by of the coffee shop. North Beverly Drive was devoid of traffic-at this hour the whole city had the feel of a sleepy small town. He parked on a parallel street, Canon, set the alarm on his phone to nine-thirty, and promptly fell asleep.

When the alarm went off the street was bustling and the car had grown uncomfortably warm. His first order of business was finding a public restroom to do some morning ablutions. There was a gas station a block away. He grabbed his overnight bag, got out of the car and heard a sound, his prepaid phone clattering onto the sidewalk. He swore at himself, picked it up and stuffed it back in his pants.

At that moment Will’s screen blip at the Area 51 Ops Center went dark. Frazier was alerted and did a caustic rant before calming down and concluding, “It’ll be okay. He’s in our box. In a half hour this’ll be history.”

Sal and Tony’s Coffee Shop was popular. A mix of locals and tourists crammed the tables and booths. It smelled of pancake batter, coffee, and hash, and when Will arrived a few minutes early, his ears were assaulted by loud conversations.

The hostess greeted him with a gravelly cigarette voice: “How’re you doing, honey? You a single?”

“I’m meeting someone.” He looked around. “I don’t think he’s here yet.” Shackleton was supposed to be at the back door near the pay phone at ten.

“Shouldn’t be too long. We’ll have you seated in a couple of minutes.”

“I need to use your phone,” he said.

“I’ll find you.”

From the back of the restaurant, Will studied the room, jumping from table to table, profiling the customers. There was an elderly man with a cane, and his wife-locals. Four smartly dressed young men-salesmen. Three pale flabby women with Rodeo Drive visors-tourists. Six Korean women-tourists. A father with a six-year-old son-divorce visitation. A strung-out young couple in their twenties in tattered jeans-locals. Two middle-aged men and a woman with Verizon shirts-workers.

And then there was a table of four in the middle of the room that made his palms clammy. Four men in their thirties, cut from the same piece of cloth. Clean-cut, recent haircuts, fit-he could tell from their necks they were lifters. All of them were trying too hard to appear casual in loose shirts and khakis, forcing the pass-the-hash-browns banter. One of them had his fanny pack laid on the table.

None of them looked his way, and he pretended not to look at them. He shuffled his feet and waited by the phone, keeping them in his peripheral field. Agency boys; which agency, he didn’t know. Everything told him to abort, to walk out the back door and keep going, but then what? He had to find Shackleton and this was the only way. He’d have to deal with the lifters. He felt the weight of his gun against his ribs every time he breathed.

Frazier felt a spark of electricity coursing through his body when Will Piper appeared on his monitor. The fanny pack was being manipulated by one of the men to track him, and the monitor showed him standing up against a wall beside a pay phone.

“Okay, DeCorso, that’s good,” Frazier said into his headset mic. “I’ve got him.” He clenched his jaw. He wanted to see the screen fill with the second target, he wanted to fire out the go order and to watch his men take both of them down and bundle them up for special delivery.

Will explored his options. He did his best imitation of a casual saunter and entered the men’s room for a look-see. There were no windows. He splashed some cold water on his face and wiped himself dry. It was still a few minutes before ten. He left the men’s room and headed straight out the back door. He wanted to see if any of the men made a move, but more important, he wanted to scope out his environs. There was an alleyway running between Beverly and Canon that serviced the buildings on both streets. He saw the back entrances of a bookstore, a drugstore, a beauty salon, a shoe store, and a bank all within a stone’s throw. To his left the alley opened up into a parking lot servicing one of the commercial buildings on Canon. There were foot routes that would take him north, south, east, or west. He felt a little less trapped and went back inside.

“There you are!” the hostess called out from the front, startling him. “I got your table.”

The table for two was near the window, but the view to the phone was unimpeded. It was 10:00 A.M. The men at the middle table were getting more coffee.