Truth Or Die Part 11

I jogged up alongside him. The kid was a workout. "Yeah, but you didn't say where."

"It's right up ahead."

As we walked another block, I couldn't help picturing the two guys ransacking my apartment. As unsettling as that was, though, the idea that they were there instead of getting ready to leap out from around the next corner with guns blazing managed to m.u.f.fle the loudness between my ears. Still ...

"If we're supposedly safe for a bit," I said, "why are you walking so d.a.m.n fast?"

"Margin of error," he said, his shoulders lifting with a quick shrug. "There's always the chance I could be dead wrong."

And just like that, the city was screaming into my ears again, right up until the next corner, where Owen stopped on a dime and pointed.

"There," he said. "That's where we're going."

I followed the line of his finger across the street to a giant gla.s.s cube, at least three stories high and just as wide. If it had been shaped like a pyramid, we would've been in front of I. M. Pei's entrance to the Louvre in Paris.

Instead, it was the entrance to the Apple store beneath the concourse of the General Motors Building. Is the kid buying me a new iPhone?

"What do we need to do in there?" I asked.

"What they're hoping for," he said. "Something foolish."

CHAPTER 34.

OWEN LOOKED as if he were casing the joint, but only to me. To the rest of the store he simply looked like another Apple fanboy browsing about the tables of iPads, iPods, and iPhones.

I was following closely behind him. "Are we waiting for something?" I finally asked. "Or someone?"

Owen stopped in front of a MacBook Pro, angling the screen toward him a bit before clicking on the icon for the Safari Web browser. I couldn't tell if he'd even heard me.

"McLean, Virginia," he said.

"Excuse me?"

"That's where the very first Apple store opened. It was in a mall called Tysons Corner Center in McLean, Virginia."

"I would've guessed somewhere near Cupertino," I said.

"Yeah, I would've guessed the same thing." He was typing a series of letters and numbers into the search bar. It looked like gibberish. "Instead, Steve Jobs opened the first store nearly three thousand miles away from his headquarters." Owen turned to me. "Interesting, huh?"

"I suppose."

"Of course, you know what's also in McLean?" he asked.

This much I did know. Or, at least, I was able to figure it out given the kid's resume. "Langley," I answered.

He nodded. "Just saying."

With that, he punched the Enter b.u.t.ton, the screen instantly going black as if he'd turned it off. Just as quick, it flashed back on with a burst of white and a loading icon I'd certainly never seen before on a Mac or any other computer, for that matter. We weren't in Kansas anymore.

"Any blue-shirts looking this way?" he asked, typing what looked to be a pa.s.sword.

I looked around. All the Apple store employees in their blue T-shirts were busy with other customers.

"All clear," I said. For what, though? A Swiss bank account withdrawal? Rerouting planes over Kennedy?

Owen pulled a flash drive from his pocket, sliding it into a USB port and pulling up a video file. Immediately, I recognized the image. The beige carpet, the beige walls, the seamless tunnel of blandness ...

Once again, I was back at the Lucinda Hotel.

The angle of the video-looking down-was from the end of the hallway on the seventeenth floor. My first thought was that Owen had tapped into a feed from a surveillance camera, albeit a color one with a super-crisp picture. Why would the Lucinda spring for that? They wouldn't.

"I attached the camera above the exit sign by the stairs," said Owen, all but reading my mind. "It's wireless."

He interrupted the live feed to cue up the footage from the beginning, back when he first checked into the hotel. He had recorded everything. Every second of every minute of every person who wanted to kill first him and then, later, me.

He was fast-forwarding through it all, but it was all right there, surreal as h.e.l.l. Claire's killer arriving. Owen leaving. My showing up, followed by the duo from Bethesda Terrace, who, after wielding their magic pliers, indeed pulled double duty as the world's fastest cleanup crew, complete with removing Claire's killer wrapped in a blanket. Perhaps the most unsettling part about that detail was how nonchalant they were carrying a dead body toward the stairwell. Just another day at the office.

Next came the arrival of the police and me again. Or, at least, it would've been. Owen had paused the recording, rewinding slowly before stopping on a clean shot of one of our would-be a.s.sa.s.sins. With a crop, cut, and paste, Owen fed the image into what I gathered was some kind of restricted personnel file of the CIA. But nothing was happening.

"s.h.i.t," he muttered under his breath. "So much for the front door."

That was when things got a bit freaky.

Owen reached into his other pocket, pulling out a small contact lens case. Before I could even ask what the h.e.l.l he was doing, he'd put a red-tinted lens in his left eye and stared directly into the tiny camera above the MacBook Pro's screen.

Now, suddenly-open sesame-everything was happening. Pixelated fragments of the guy's facial features were bouncing from one photo to the next at the speed of a strobe light while charts and graphs measured the similarities. Seizure alert. The screen looked like the love child of a PowerPoint presentation and a pinball machine on tilt.

"This might take a while to get a match," said Owen, removing the lens from his eye with a quick pinch.

"You just hacked your way into the CIA, didn't you?" I asked.

He looked at me and flashed the quickest-and guiltiest-of smiles. "Hacked is such an ugly word," he said.

CHAPTER 35.

OWEN WATCHED the screen and waited. I waited and watched Owen. He was doing that thing again, washing his hands under an imaginary faucet.

And me? What was I doing?

From the get-go, the very beginning, I'd been playing catchup. Who killed Claire? Who was the source she was going to see, and what did he know?

Now I knew. So what next?

It seemed pretty obvious to me. Of course, that should've been my first red flag.

"Owen?" I said.

"Yeah?"

His eyes remained locked on the screen. He was barely even blinking. That was fine. He didn't need to look at me so long as he listened.

"We need to go to the police," I said.

"Yeah, I know. That makes sense."

"Good."

"But we're not going to."

"Why not?"

"Because it doesn't work that way," he said. "They can't help us."

"They can at least protect us."

He threw me a look. "You really think so?"

It had occurred to me. Maybe I wasn't seeing the big picture, or at least how it looked from his point of view. "You want to go to another paper, is that what you're saying? Maybe a news network?" I asked.

Finally, he stopped rubbing his hands and turned to me. The words were calm and measured, but the meaning was anything but. To h.e.l.l with whistle-blowing. This was no longer about going public. This was now personal.

"A decision was made to kill my boss ... then Claire ... then me ... then you," he said. "And if you can make a decision like that, you're not worried about the law. You're above the law."

Attorneys, especially former prosecutors, generally bristle at the idea of anyone being above the law. Then again, I'd been disbarred.

"What exactly do you have in mind?" I asked.

"The only way to smoke them out is to remain their target," he said. "Think about it. As long as they're coming for us ..."

"It's a path right back to them," I said.

Owen nodded-bingo-before glancing back at the screen. "Now we just need a little background information," he said. "Always get to know better the people who want you dead."

Words to live by.

So there you had it. Why we were standing in the middle of an Apple store playing match-dot-com with the personnel files of the CIA. Let them come after us, Owen was saying. Let's be foolish.

"Can I borrow your phone for a minute?" I asked. "I seem to have lost mine."

Owen ignored my sarcasm. "Who are you calling?"

"No one."

He still wasn't sure, but he handed it to me anyway. Then he watched as I made a beeline to the accessories section, pulling an i-FlashDrive off the shelf.

As I began to open the package, a female blue-shirt with a ponytail and geek-chic gla.s.ses came over in a panic. She looked as if I'd just defaced the Mona Lisa.

"Sir! You can't just-"

"How much is it?" I asked, reaching for my wallet.

She craned her neck to check the price. "Forty-four ninety-five," she said. "Plus tax."

I gave her fifty. Then, before she could tell me she needed to scan the bar code, I removed the drive and handed over the packaging. "I think I'll pa.s.s on the extended warranty," I said, walking away.

I returned to Owen while plugging the drive into his phone. "What are the file names of the two recordings you showed me at the Oak Tavern?" I asked.

He gave me the names and I transferred them to the drive. I handed him back his phone. "Thanks," I said.

He motioned to the drive as I put it in my pocket. "What's that for?"

"Just tell me where I can meet you in an hour," I said, taking a couple of steps back.

"Wait. Where are you going?"

I reached for my sungla.s.ses, sliding them on. "Margin of error," I said. "Just in case you get us both killed."

CHAPTER 36.

I QUICKLY wrote everything down on the only blank piece of paper I could get my hands on in the back of the cab taking me across town to Eighth Avenue. It was the flip side of a log sheet the driver was using to keep track of fares. He was fine letting me have it, although when I also asked for his pen and clipboard it was clear I was pushing my luck.

"You want to drive, too?" he asked.

After he dropped me off in front of the New York Times Building, it dawned on me how long it had been since I'd last set foot in Claire's office. One reason was that she didn't actually have an office, just a desk out in the open in the very crowded national affairs section. Visiting Claire was like being on the wrong side of the bars at the zoo. No privacy. You were essentially on display.