Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

“So someone had time to keep Esposito under the lift—probably at gunpoint—and pull the hydraulic plug without being seen,” said Dar. “Interesting.”

“Both the LAPD and San Diego detectives are hunting for Paulie Satchel…the claimant who was supposed to have been meeting Esposito there.”

“Good,” said Dar. “I hope they find him before this string of accidents continues in his direction.”

“You don’t think that Paulie was the one who killed Esposito?”

“Nope,” said Dar, relaxing as the traffic stopped completely. He checked in his mirror. The same car had been following him since he left the Justice Center. He would have been alarmed, but he recognized Syd’s Taurus and her mop of blonde-brown hair. For a chief investigator, she did a lousy job of covert surveillance. “I know Paulie,” said Dar. “He’s a small-time liability claimant…he’s had more disability claims than most people have had head colds. He’s not the hit man.”

“If you say so,” replied Trudy. “I’ll keep you informed. Is your phone going to be on?”

“Later,” said Dar. “Right now I’m going shopping.”

Dar’s shopping was more efficient than Syd’s surreptitious tailing. He stopped at a downtown Sears and bought an inexpensive but rugged sewing machine. He drove to an army surplus store that catered to hunters and bought three old two-piece sets of camouflage fatigues and a wide-brimmed boonie hat. He also found a mosquito-netting rig for his head and shoulders—“strong enough to keep out Alaskan ’skeeters,” said the clerk, a one-eyed Vietnam vet, “but fine-mesh enough to keep out the fucking black flies.” He had to try two more outdoors stores before finding the larger netting he needed in the quantity he required.

Dar had to go to several fabric stores and another outdoor store before finding all the tough canvas and hessian and burlap fabric he wanted in the colors he needed. He had the last fabric store he visited cut the canvas into patch-sized segments, and the rolls of dun-colored fabric into literally hundreds of irregular strips and bits. At one point he had four clerks and the manager cutting and ripping and slicing. The woman who ran the store looked at him as if he were crazy, but she took his money.

Carrying the huge bags of fabric fragments back to his truck, Dar paused when Syd got out of her car, parked in the same lot, and walked over to him. “I give up,” she said. “I don’t have the faintest, foggiest, fucking idea what you’re doing.”

“Good,” said Dar.

“Will you tell me?”

“Sure,” said Dar, unlocking his truck and dropping the bags in. “I’m making a ghillie suit.”

Syd shook her head. “What’s that?”

“You’ll have to look it up, Investigator. Are you going to keep following me?”

Syd bit her lip. “Dar, I know you don’t like it, but I feel responsible for—”

“Fuck ‘responsible,’” said Dar softly. “You’ve got a job to do and so do I. Neither one of us is going to get it done if you’re following me all the time.”

Syd hesitated. Dar touched her bare forearm. “Let’s not work against one another,” he said. “My best bet for staying alive is if you succeed in putting Dallas Trace and his shooters away quickly. Let’s do that.”

Syd nodded but said. “Will you answer one question for me?”

“Sure,” said Dar, “if you’ll give me an honest response to a question in return.”

“All right,” said Syd. “Where are you going to be tonight…this weekend?”

“I’m driving up to the cabin from here,” said Dar, “but not staying the night. I’ll drive back to the condo late. As for this weekend…well, I may go camping on Sunday and take a day or two off.”

“Camping,” Syd said dubiously.

“Sort of,” said Dar.

“Will your phone be on while you’re…camping?”

“No,” said Dar. “But I promise you one thing, Investigator. I’ll be someplace where neither Dallas Trace nor any of his minions would think to hunt for me.”

“Minions,” said Syd softly. “All right. I’ll get off your tail. For now.”

“My turn,” said Dar. He looked around. They were alone in the parking lot. The evening shadows were getting longer. “What was that charade of a meeting this morning?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know damned well what I mean,” said Dar, with no anger in his voice. He leaned against his Land Cruiser and waited.

“There have been serious leaks,” said Syd, “during the past month. We’re certain that Trace and the others in the Alliance are getting our plans even before we put them in motion.”

“The grand jury?” said Dar.

Syd shook her head. “This is operational stuff. It’s being passed along by someone in the task force or someone privy to much of our information. So I had today’s meeting and we’ll be instigating some phone taps.”

“On Hernandez or Sutton?” said Dar, surprised. “Unless you suspect Lawrence and Trudy and me and are going to tap our phones as well.”

“Nope,” said Syd. “This stuff was being leaked long before you and the Stewarts got involved.”

“Are you tapping Special Agent Warren’s lines as well?”

Syd made a face. “The Bureau’s doing the tapping, moron.”

“Typical,” said Dar. Then, in a more serious voice, “I can’t believe that your friend Santana’s going back undercover and that you both let the information out when you know there’s a leak.”

Syd frowned. “My ‘friend’ Santana knows what he’s doing, Dar. We mentioned it deliberately. He knows that there’s a good chance of his being made even if there weren’t a leak. The official story is that he’ll be operating alone, but actually there will be three Latino agents going in as illegals at the same time.”

“Fraud Division?” asked Dar.

“FBI,” said Syd. “We’re into the major leagues now. Tom knows exactly what he’s doing and he’ll make sure that his back is covered. Why does your voice get funny every time you talk about Santana?”

Dar said nothing.

The traffic was very heavy on Interstate 8 headed east, San Diego breathing out its week’s worth of tired day workers. Dar kept the windows closed, the air-conditioning on, and played a CD of Bernstein’s Berlin recording of the “Freiheit” Ninth while he relaxed. The traffic was much less dense on Highway 79 headed north and no one had exited the interstate behind him. He had not seen Syd’s Taurus during the commute, and as far as he could tell, no one else was following.

The shadows were growing longer and merging as he drove up to his cabin. He checked his usual little telltales to make sure that no one had come through the front door since he had last left, and then he let himself in and locked the door behind him.

From the outside, there was no hint that the cabin had a basement: no basement windows, no outside entrance. But it did. Dar rolled back the red Persian rug on the far side of his bed, found the faint seam in the floor, opened it, and used another key to unlatch the trapdoor. The basement light went on automatically as the door was lifted and latched in place.

Dar went down the steep ladder and shivered slightly in the cave-coolness of the narrow corridor. There was nothing in this cement-block hallway except the steel door at the end. This required two keys to open and Dar fumbled for the second one.

The room beyond was only a third the size of the huge living space upstairs, but it was large enough for Dar’s purposes. He had to snap on the lights here, but once they were on, there were no shadows in the neatly arranged stacks of boxes, crates, shelves, and drawers. The temperature in this room was regulated and the air dehumidified. The cinder-block walls were lined on the inside by a contained-asbestos layer and a thin wall of aluminum. The room was essentially a large safe-deposit box, safe from fire, tornado, or distant nuclear blast. Dar smiled at the irony of how much this rarely visited room had cost him.