Ridley Pearson - The Body of David Hayes

“You’ll have backup?”

“Speaking the lingo now?”

“I’m a fast learner,” she said, “and don’t avoid the question.”

“Not officially, no,” he told her honestly. “That would mean answering all sorts of questions at some point, questions you and I don’t want to answer.”

“Forget that,” she said. “I’d rather answer questions, pay a fine, go to jail, than be stupid about this.”

“John will be there. Outside. He’ll call for backup if needed. It’s a meeting is all,” he said, trying to reassure her. “We expected this.” He corrected himself, “ I expected this.”

“It’s not worth it, Lou.”

“It is ,” he said. “It’s very much worth it.”

“Not if you’re at risk.”

“It’s not like that. Honestly. If I thought it was, I wouldn’t do this. He’s not going to arrange a meeting if he plans on torturing me; his goons are going to bust in here and do it. He has questions. That’s all.”

“We gave him his money. He should be happy.”

“Absolutely,” Boldt said, trying to keep the lie out of his eyes. “Maybe he wants to thank me.”

She leveled a look onto him, and he knew then that she knew. He saw the first twinges of realization sink into her. “What did you do?” She closed her eyes, then looked at him fiercely. “You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?”

The trouble with marriage was that all that familiarity, the years of arguments and discussions, of practical jokes and conspiracies, meant that one’s barriers became invisible to the spouse, easily penetrated. Liz looked through him and read his thoughts effortlessly.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “You conned a con man? Lou? Speak to me!”

“I followed my conscience on this one.”

“It was all done , Lou. We did it. Over! The children,” she pleaded, as either her concern or her anger glassed her eyes.

“Exactly,” Boldt said. “I’m not saying I did anything, but if I did, I did it for the children. No lies , right?” This had been their mutual agreement going into parenthood, to lead by example. The comment struck deeper, as he knew it would. They’d been living nothing but lies for too long, and for him this was a fresh start instead of a continuation.

He kissed her good-bye without saying anything more. He had no sense that he was heading into anything more dangerous than on any other day of work. A meeting was all. She accompanied him to the front door. An unmarked police car still watched the house. Boldt hoped this meeting with Svengrad might end the need for such precautions.

She touched him once lightly on the arm as he opened the door. The tenderness of that gesture cut him to his core and he felt emotions ripple through him. He had explanations for everything he’d done, for what he was about to do, but they would have to go unspoken. He hoped they might go unspoken for a very long time. He smiled at her and let her shut the door behind him.

“Drive,” he said, and LaMoia pulled the Jetta away from the curb and out onto the street.

Boldt looked into the empty backseat.

“It’s in the trunk,” LaMoia said. “Thing’s about the size of a microwave oven.”

Boldt shook his head.

LaMoia said, “I’m telling you, Sarge, it works great.”

“Forget it, okay?”

“No way! You gotta let me do this. If nothing else we put this guy back into the Stone Age. Every computer, every phone, every disk, every tape , zeroed.”

He’d explained it to Boldt in trying to sell him on the idea. The box in the car’s trunk emitted an electromagnetic pulse, essentially a blast of radio waves that rearranged any magnetic charge. The military had been developing the technology for years-first discovered as a side effect of an atomic blast, a pulse of energy that, while not radioactive, interrupted and defeated anything with a memory chip. The technology remained fairly bulky and heavy, still too conspicuous to be smuggled onto an airplane, though this and other uses were believed possible prospects for terrorists down the road.

“I think we’ll do this the old-fashioned way,” Boldt said. “Leave James Bond for the movies.” He added, “I’m going to talk to him. That’s all.”

“He’ll never give you back that tape.”

“Probably not.”

“All I do is plug the thing in and turn it on. It uses the wiring in the building like a huge antenna. The pulse-a radio wave-goes down that wiring, and like an antenna, anything within fifteen to twenty feet of any wall, that means anything plugged in or not, is zapped. Bam! Erased. Zeroed. It’s fucking phenomenal. Cell phones, pagers, calculators. In your pocket. In a chair. Even inside a safe . Refrigerators have memory chips in them. Did you know that?”

“I think we’ll leave his refrigerators alone this time.”

“No matter what he tells you, he’s going to keep a copy of the tape. You said so yourself. Then he’s got his finger on you. He owns you, Sarge.”

Boldt shot his sergeant a look. He didn’t like this talked about in that way.

“This thing will erase it. It’s magnetic. Anything and everything in that building gets erased. Doesn’t matter where it is. Zap! Fried tomatoes.”

“We’ll do this my way,” Boldt said.

“That’s fine, Sarge. But if I find an outside outlet, I’m popping the trunk and plugging this thing in. My suggestion is: Leave your cell phone in the car.”

Boldt knew he meant well, and initially he’d even supported the idea because the effectiveness of the technology sounded convincing. But if the contraption worked-and he was beginning to think it might-he thought it unwise to be meeting with Svengrad when tragedy struck. He explained this to LaMoia and saw the man’s enthusiasm sink.

LaMoia dropped Boldt off outside the corrugated steel warehouse and wished him luck. Boldt did, in fact, carry his cell phone, and it was set to dial LaMoia’s phone with two pushes of the same button. Boldt would hold his hand on that phone in his coat pocket, ready to call the cavalry if needed. Although LaMoia’s instructions were to call for backup and to wait until it arrived, Boldt knew he’d never wait. That was fine with him.

Yasmani Svengrad sat behind his desk in the office area built into the refrigerated warehouse space. Boldt saw two other guys, one of them Alekseevich, who looked a shade paler than when Boldt had last seen him. Neither man made so much as a gesture that might telegraph their prior introduction. Boldt had been searched, his weapon and his cell phone temporarily confiscated, his plan to signal LaMoia disrupted. The magazine had been removed from his weapon, which now sat useless next to his phone at the far corner of the large desk. Boldt kept his eye on the phone. If he dived for it, he might be able to get the signal off.

Boldt sat down in a chair this time, not waiting for an invitation.

“Where is it?” Svengrad asked. He’d trimmed his beard recently, possibly for the reception, now less than twenty-four hours behind them.

“Where is what?” One of any cop’s most practiced skills was the art of lying. Interrogations required hours of playing straight-faced to the most challenging situation. Boldt knew he excelled at such subterfuge, confident that he could go one-on-one with the most heinous murderer. For all his experience as a military man, Yasmani Svengrad was out of his league.

“You do not want to play such games.”

Boldt knew he was supposed to feel the chill of such a statement, but it struck him as amusing instead. He allowed nothing to be revealed from his expression. He couldn’t be sure Svengrad wouldn’t conceal a tape recorder to later try to use to extort him, so he had to tiptoe around outright admission. Then again, LaMoia’s machine would erase such tapes as well. “Still looking for that money. Is that it?”