Cutting Edge pp-6 Read online

  Ricci shifted his attention back to Glenn.

  “Your answer to my proposition final?” he said.

  Glenn nodded.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it. And if you ever need help with something up north, count on me to be there,” he said. “But this town stays my home base.”

  Ricci grunted. He was still rotating his glass between his fingertips.

  Glenn leaned forward across the table, pointed to the soda.

  “Now you need to tell me if you ever intend to start on that, so I know whether to order another beer or call it a night,” he said.

  Ricci regarded him quietly, seeming to consider.

  “Can’t say why, but you quoting the Bible off the top of your head, reading papers by university eggheads, somehow it’s no stunner to me,” he said. “Explain how you grew up listening to Barry Manilow without the homies kicking your ass every day, maybe I’ll stick around.”

  Glenn grinned, waved his hand in the air to catch the barkeep’s attention.

  “Settle back and get comfortable,” he said.

  Ricci gave him the slightest of nods, then carefully raised his glass off the tabletop and drank.

  * * *

  A high-intensity electric lantern in his hand, Siegfried Kuhl strode slowly around the white station wagon and utility van parked near his cabin in the late-night darkness. What he saw satisfied him. The PG&E logo on their flanks, the racked ladder on one side of the van’s roof, their yellow safety beacons, every exterior feature was convincing. Indistinguishable from the real thing under his scrupulous inspection.

  Kuhl opened their doors one at a time and repeatedly leaned inside with the lantern to examine their interiors from front to rear. Again he was quite pleased. He had studied photographs of the power company’s repair fleet and even the upholstery and carpeting matched.

  He turned to Ciras and Anton, who stood a few paces from him awaiting his assessment. They had driven the vehicles from a shop outside Monterey where their subterranean customizers had performed the remodeling work.

  “Good enough,” he said. Then he went to stand behind the vehicles and motioned toward their rear license plates. “You’ve checked these, too?”

  Ciras gave him a quick little nod.

  “I was impressed,” Anton said. “It must’ve been quite some trick getting them down right.”

  Kuhl regarded the spike-haired Croatian with a kind of fascination. Anton’s speech bore no trace of the thick Slavic accent, with its hard glottal stops and drawn-out vowel sounds, that had characterized it when he’d been inserted into the United States on a student visa two years earlier. And his capacity to absorb dialect was only part of what suited him for the role of forward scout and intelligence gatherer — the ideal sleeper agent. It was as though Anton could plug into any cultural reservoir and saturate his persona with its mannerisms. While his bluff at the animal shelter had been intended to massage useful information from Gordian’s daughter, the performance had gained results that went beyond Kuhl’s expectations and had been pivotal to his fixing an operational timetable.

  Returning his attention to the license plate, Kuhl shone his light directly onto its face. The tag’s reflectorized plastic sheeting material glowed bright under its beam so the alphabetical prefix and serial numbers were illuminated. He stepped back from the rear of the van, moved to one side of the bumper, and again turned his lantern onto the plate.

  A vertical row of hidden verification symbols became clearly visible, running down the middle of the tag, dark against its surface. Used by law-enforcement personnel to differentiate authentic license plates from counterfeits, they were composed of tiny glass beads in the sheeting which had been coated with a special polymer that made them nonreflective when viewed at a thirty degree slant. Due to the complex polymerization and embedding processes involved in their production, the coded symbols were the most difficult feature of the plate to replicate. But Harlan DeVane’s resources had proven equal to the task.

  Kuhl nodded his approval and looked over at the two men. “Move the vehicles into the trees where they can’t be seen,” he said. “Then join me and the others inside.”

  He strode back toward the cabin. It was a pleasant night. The air was cool and fresh and the chirping of insects surrounded him. Somewhere in the distance a night bird whooped. He could see Lido watching his approach through a front window, the brute’s head silhouetted against the light of the room beyond. A good night, yes. Something of its atmosphere hinted at the best moments of his long caesura in Europe — those when he had found a kind of peace at the core of his typhonic restlessness. Perhaps, Kuhl thought, this was because it followed a day on which he had accomplished everything necessary in the way of final preparations, and still managed to exercise his curiosity about something of unrelated personal interest.

  Before dawn that morning, Kuhl had gotten into his Explorer and driven west across the Ventana wilderness to the San Antonio de Padua Mission. He carried his fraudulent identification documents in his wallet. Beside him on the passenger seat were his camera and a packet of maps and tourist brochures. The cargo section held a bladdered hydration backpack, a length of rope, hiking boots, his electric lantern, and some basic tools that Kuhl had left in plain sight to ensure they drew no suspicion from military guards — a small wood ax, a collapsible shovel, and a Japanese pull saw.

  Kuhl wore an open-collared chambray shirt with a Saint Christopher’s medallion on a silver necklace, and had wrapped a rosary around the stem of his rearview mirror. On the vehicle’s rear section were a pair of bumper stickers Anton had obtained for him in the city of Carmel. One of them pictured a small map of the original Camino Reál twining in and out of US 101, the sites of the Spanish missions along the road circled and marked by crucifixes. Splayed across the map in large see-through text were the words FRANCISCAN MISSION TOURS, and, below it in a smaller typeface, the name and telephone number of a local travel agency. The other bumper sticker read: I’M ON A MISSION TO SEE THE MISSIONS. An adhesive plaque with the Greek acrostic IXΘYE engraved within the Christian fish symbol was mounted on the SUV’s tailgate.

  Out past the cattle and horse ranches, Kuhl had wound through miles of rolling scrub country on a steady climb into the Santa Lucia Mountains, where he had seen the sunlight wash up over the wooded lower mountain slopes to eventually flush their bare sandstone peaks with orange. By full daybreak he had reached the edge of the valley that overlooked the confluence of the San Miguel and San Antonio Rivers, and made his slow descent into the basin following road signs to the army reservation and mission. At length, he stopped at the guard station mentioned to him by Anagkazo, the dog breeder.

  The MP inside the checkpoint booth had politely asked Kuhl for his driver’s license and vehicle registration. As Kuhl handed them to him through his lowered window, a second guard had walked around the Explorer, casting discreet glances first over its body, and then through its rear windscreen.

  They had seen nothing amiss and waved the visitor on after returning his papers.

  On his way toward the mission quadrangle, Kuhl had passed some branching roads that ran toward a gated cantonment and noticed additional barricaded checkpoints posted with signs reading FPCON LEVEL ALPHA. These indicated an elevated alert for terrorist activity that had been implemented as a rule at all military installations in the United States after the strike on New York City a few years before — a step up from FPCON Normal, but significantly below the Bravo, Charlie, and Delta force protection levels exercised whenever specific threat warnings were issued by federal authorities. Kuhl would not have chanced his trip if any of the higher stages of alert had been in current effect, but his men had determined otherwise, and the mission grounds had been a considerable lure to him — the prospect of an easy penetration spicing the venture with a provocative element of scorn.

  It was also a preparatory drill of sorts. The moment approached when Kuhl would have to plunge deeper into hiding than a
t any previous time in his mercenary existence. Knowing he faced a manhunt of long duration and unprecedented intensity, he had wanted to test his reflexes for survival and subterfuge — smooth any hitches that may have developed over his latent period — in a climate of heightened but nonurgent scrutiny.

  More than two hundred years after its founding, a small order of Franciscans still occupied the mission. While some of them chose to live in meditative solitude, others worked in its gift shop and offered guided tours of its grounds on a regular schedule. Kuhl was mostly able to avoid the organized tour groups and prowl the compound alone, stopping to see its olive gardens, its chapel, its cloistered tile-roofed archways, its centuries-old aqueducts and gristmill. Near the end of his wanderings he had found himself in a chamber with simple forms of musical notation painted on the walls. There he studied the instruments on display: a native American hand drum, a violin and cello, a baroque lute and lyre. One wall of the room was covered with a diagram of a huge upraised hand, the front of each finger marked with numbers and Spanish calligraphy. This had caught Kuhl’s attention like a barbed hook, and he had stood taking photographs of the diagram, thinking it would be a fine reference for the construction of a possible scale replica, should he ever choose to resume that pursuit.

  As Kuhl stood with his eye to the lens, one of the tonsured monks had noticed him from the outer hall and paused in the entryway.

  “The chart you see shows the hand signals our fraternal predecessors used to use to teach their Indian converts Western scales,” he said. “As new believers, they were taught not only to petition the Lord with their prayers, but exalt him with music.”

  Kuhl had turned toward the entrance and stared coldly at him over his lowered camera.

  “It is good they were given their diversions,” he said. “All God’s prisoners are in need of them.”

  Kuhl paid no heed to the monk’s reaction. With a slight bow, he had touched a hand to the Saint Christopher’s charm around his neck and brushed past him into the hall.

  Minutes afterward, he had driven west from the compound. It was not yet one P.M., giving him plenty of time to do his work.

  In an oak- and pine-forested stretch of rolling highland some thirty miles back toward Big Sur, Kuhl shifted the Explorer into four-wheel drive, eased it off the roadside into the cover of some scrub growth, and cut the engine. Then he went around to the rear section and got out his hiking boots, backpack, and tools. He changed from his loafers into the boots, loaded the tools into the pack, strapped it over his shoulders, closed the Explorer’s tailgate, and started into the brush.

  Kuhl had thoroughly scouted the terrain en route to the San Antonio de Padua Mission, concentrating on its prominent rock formations, and was convinced the jutting outcrops would afford the precise geological features he required.

  He had searched about for a while before the hollow presented itself to him. At the base of a sandstone rise effaced by weather and the roots of the scrub oak studding its surface, a portion of the hillside had worn away beneath an overhanging ledge to create a moderately deep cave that seemed well suited to his purposes. Here, he believed, was an excellent fallback shelter.

  Kuhl had stooped low as he entered the ragged hole of its mouth to investigate, beamed his electric torch into the dark space beyond, and within seconds known his initial impression was correct. The entrance would require covering, but there was an abundance of raw material around him, and he had all the necessary tools in his backpack.

  Kuhl found that the long hours he’d spent carving scale miniatures from featureless pieces of wood had yielded a surplus of patience for his work, even a kind of gratification in it, that he would not have known before. Time slipped from his notice as he cut limbs from the trees and underbrush, cleaning the leaves and twigs from the oak branches to form base poles of the proper height, leaving the pine boughs more or less intact, shagged with needles for a rainproof thatch screen. When Kuhl had finished, he sorted the poles and thatching into separate bundles, tied them together with lengths of rope, and brought them into the cave, where they would remain hidden until such occasion as they might be of use.

  Returning to his Explorer, Kuhl had checked his watch for the first time since he’d pulled into the thicket. It was just after six o’clock in the evening. The hours had truly gone winging by.

  He had been back on the road, headed for his rented cabin, before the last of the sunlight was drained from the sky.

  Now midnight had come and gone, and Kuhl could hear the engines of the false power company vehicles awakening as Ciras and Anton started them up and swung away into the darkness. At the door of the cabin, Lido greeted him, licking and sniffing his hand. Kuhl paused to scratch the dog under its muzzle, then strode forward through the foyer. He padded close behind him, treading softly for a creature of its immense size.

  Kuhl’s bond with the Schutzhunds had been immediate and was strongest with the alpha.

  He entered the living room, Lido at his heels. Four men sat waiting there in silence. On the carpeted floor, the two other shepherds peered up at him with their gleaming, attentive black eyes.

  Kuhl looked around at his men.

  “Let’s have one of you put up some coffee,” he said. “I want to review tomorrow’s action in detail before we rest.”

  * * *

  Startled awake by the sound of his own prolonged adenoidal snore, Rob Howell lifted his chin off his pillow and realized the baseball game he’d been watching on TV had been replaced by an infomercial.

  Rob glanced at his alarm clock in the flickering glow of the set. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. Wonderful, he thought. The Seattle Mariners and Oakland A’s in a match that might very well decide which team won the hotly contested AL West playoff slot, and he’d slipped into dreamland with the score tied at the bottom of the seventh. If that wasn’t evidence of a man suffering from acute overwork, Rob didn’t know what was.

  He groped blearily around on his nightstand for the remote, couldn’t locate it, felt for it on the bed, and found it wedged between himself and the vague shape under the quilt that was Cynthia snuggled into a sleeping ball.

  “Later for you, Mr. Crap-o-matic Veggie Master,” he muttered to the tube, ready to thumb off the power. Then he reconsidered. There was always ESPN to give him the game highlights.

  Rob raised the clicker to change channels, landed on the station just as it cut away from a repeat of some NASCAR tournament to a plug for Sports Illustrated magazine. Sure, why not, what gave him the right to catch a break? He snorted, thinking he could still look forward to the news crawl at the bottom of the screen when the race footage came back on.

  Meanwhile, though, his bladder was sending him an urgent newsflash of its own.

  He slipped from under the blanket, tiptoed around the humongous doggie cushion where Rachel and Monica slept back-to-back — Ross and Joey preferred his wife’s side of the bed, while Phoebe had taken a shining to a spot near the head of the baby’s crib — and went out into the hall.

  It was a chill night — well, morning—and after concluding his urgent visit to the bathroom, Rob peeked into the nursery to make sure that Laurie was covered. She was, indeed, nicely tucked in and curled into a ball like a diminutive version of her mother.

  Rob blew her a kiss through the half-open door, saw Phoebe’s head pop up at him from her favorite nesting place on the rug, blew her one for good measure, and was starting back toward his bedroom when he decided to check on one more thing. He would be leaving for his fill-in shift at the Fairwinds before daybreak and wanted to be certain that he’d put his briefcase of ledgers and files on the little chair Cynthia had stood beside the front door for that single, solitary purpose, hoping to avoid another absentminded misadventure wherein he drove off to work without it.

  Sure enough, it was there. Waiting conspicuously for him to snatch it up on his way out to the car.

  Rob yawned and turned into his bedroom, having forgotten about a
ledger he’d been looking at earlier and set down on the kitchen phone stand before hurrying to watch the ball game’s first pitch. Then he climbed back under the blankets with his wife, eager to catch the score — and a few more hours of sleep — beside the familiar warmth of her body.

  They would be the last hours Rob and Cynthia Howell spent together in life.

  NINE

  CALIFORNIA

  Tired, tired. and why not? It was five A.M.

  Hitting the SNOOZE control on her alarm clock, Julia Gordian stirred for work on Sunday thinking she could use about four more hours’ sleep, which would just about equal the number she’d actually gotten. Not that she felt she had any right to complain. There could be some good, not-so-good, and downright bad reasons for a person to stay awake into the early morning, and though it had been all too long since she’d enjoyed what was undeniably the best of them — plenty of opportunities for that had come Julia’s way since her divorce, some of them sorely tempting, but she hadn’t quite mustered the will to jump back aboard the dating merry-go-round — a baseball game like the beauty she’d watched on television last night made her bleariness seem a fair price to pay.

  Julia scooched up under the blankets, fluffed her pillows, settled against them, and drowsed a bit, giving herself a chance to ease into the day. Her mind drifted, touched on this and that like a helium balloon in a light, variable breeze. She wondered if Dad’s flight had landed in Gabon yet. Ought to be there by now. Or almost there; he’d left San Jose at three or four the day before. Africa, God. A long, long way for him to go to make a business announcement. He hadn’t sounded thrilled about it over the phone Friday night. A necessary spectacle, he’d called it. Then the subject changed. The two of them going on to lament that they’d never made up their postponed lunch date. Things had gotten in the way. Dad’s hasty preparations for his trip. Her commitment to the rescue center. Nobody to blame, just the problem with tight schedules… so why had they both sounded so guilty? They’d promised to see each other after he returned, and then Dad had transferred the receiver to Mom’s hand.