Chapter 66
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Jack stopped by his office, opened the safe and removed his bribe money and headed for the door. They were almost to the elevator when he remembered the cameras in the lobby. He and Dvora jogged back the other way. The service entrance was electronically locked and alarmed like everything else in the building. He knew the master code and within seconds they were out without setting off the alarms.
They were lost in the crowds of tourists in China Town within minutes. Every time he looked at his watch thinking they’d better hurry to get there, only a minute or so had passed. He gave Dvora a huge hug and said, “Take care of Meghan.”
“I’m going with you. Bob will protect Meghan better than I ever could. She wants me to fight this fight,” she said, grabbing his hand and pulling him further into China Town. Rather than create a scene people might notice by telling her no, he simply went along. He would ditch her soon anyway.
“Hold on. Give me your phone so I can destroy it.” She looked perplexed for a few seconds and then sad. The loss of her phone meant severing ties. She loved her iPhone and texting friends. Her thousands of twitter followers would have to do without her for a while. She used her phone for GPS as well so the Feds could follow her. He hated to kill his iPhone, but he had to. As they headed toward the restaurant he scattered bits and pieces of their phones into grates and trash cans. They turned the corner to the street that dead-ended at Mama Ling’s.
Jack stood out in a crowd and with Dvora by his side they stood out even more. A group of Korean tourists hurried toward them. He dodged like a matador to avoid the determined-looking middle-aged lady in the lead. She hit him like a fullback. He stutter-stepped to gain his balance, but the difference in mass meant she had to lose. She dropped her bag to keep from falling. He apologized in English, not remembering how to say “sorry” in Korean.
The rock-hard woman bowed and handed him the dark blue gym bag, saying, “Sorry. I knocked your bag down. I watch where I go next time.”
He took the bag, thanked her, adjusted the strap so it rode a little higher on his shoulder, and followed Dvora deeper into China Town. They stopped in front of a discount electronics store. Keeping his body toward the street and his left arm hiding most of the bag, he unzipped it half way.
Bob had been busy. There was the money he had expected, cash in twenties, banded by a bank from the look of it. He counted fifteen stacks, so $30K. There was a laptop, with charger, a Mac Air thank goodness, and two pre-paid cell phones, with charger for both car and wall. It looked like Bob was expecting a shooting war. He’d dropped in a Sig Sauer and a twin to Jack’s favorite knife, a Gerber Mark I Commando.
He glanced over Dvora’s head through the window of the electronics shop. The sixty-inch Sony LED TV, with closed-captioning and color picture-in-picture, showed two local news stories. The big picture showed an aerial scene shot from a helicopter. The crowd of hundreds gathered around a police cordon. He could barely make out the yellow tapes fluttering in the breeze. The camera zoomed in with lurching abruptness. The smaller picture showed KGO’s lead reporter, the shrill idiot he didn’t like, doing the on-the-spot.
The big picture flashed to an O’Hare family photo. His widow was a plain woman who looked like she’d be more at home at an Iowa Republican Wives’ dinner than in DNA Valley. The teenaged daughter looked like trouble. She had a pinched, mean look around her eyes, and the tender, mouth-closed look of someone getting used to braces.
The caption below read “…execution style murder of Donald O’Hare, who was president and CEO of ReWire, Inc., one of the cutting-edge genetic engineering firms here in the Bay Area. This company seems to attract tragedy. Less than three weeks ago, Meghan Allison McDonald, the company’s chief scientist, was brutally beaten during a robbery and is still in a coma.”
The big screen flashed a picture of Meghan accepting an award at last year’s Bay Area Science Excellence dinner. The picture was one of his favorites. He wanted to stay and look. The big screen changed to show a computer generated police sketch. It looked a lot like Jack, except at least five years older, with jowls. Then a sketch flashed of a woman who looked like a trashy version of Dvora. The woman looked a few years younger than Dvora. Life wasn’t fair. The closed caption scrolled:
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“This just in: The composite pictures you see on screen are of the suspects in the brutal gangland-style murder of Donald O’Hare. The man is in his late thirties to mid-forties, approximately six feet tall, and very powerfully built, weighing between one hundred ninety and two hundred and ten pounds. …”
At least they’d made him lighter. He and Dvora started moving, mostly because she grabbed him by the strap on the bag and tugged him into the alley.
She said, “Okay. Okay. Walk to the end of this alley and wait. There is a little hotel called, of all things, Heaven’s Gate. The service entrance should be on this alley to your right, near the end. If I don’t find you in fifteen minutes, you are on your own.”
“Do you have cash?”
“Fuck!” she said and smiled a grim smile. “I was just going to whip out the old Black American Express card. Habits! I have a couple hundred bucks. Should be enough for a few days.”
Jack waited, watching the rats root through the garbage behind the bad Dim Sum place backing onto the alley. They’d be sorry. He’d eaten part of a meal there. Once. The rats didn’t look like they were in the mood for conversation. He counted the money in the bag. He was wrong on the count. Two of the stacks were one hundred-dollar bills. That and the loose bills in the bottom took the total up to thirty-six thousand four hundred and seventy-one dollars. He pictured Bob opening his safe, grabbing his emergency stash, and then throwing in whatever cash he had in his wallet. Add that to the $25K Jack had in the bribe envelope and they would be fine. There was a little envelope in the bottom that he hadn’t seen with two credit cards and a note. The cards were on a bank he had never heard of and the signature block on back was blank. The cards were issued in the names of Mack Reynolds.
Bob’s note said, “The cards each have a ten thousand dollar line and are clean. There is no Mack Reynolds. I didn’t have time for an ID in that name, but will when we arrange a secure drop. Do not call anyone! Don’t use the Mac for email! I will call you with a secure number. The cell phones are throwaways, use them twice at most, destroy them, and buy others. Your first contact number is 509-555-1211. Call at 2200. Go with God.”
Go with God yourself, good buddy, Jack thought with eyes burning. It must be the garbage. He looked down at his watch knowing that at least fifteen minutes had passed, knowing he was going to be arrested any minute. The timer on his watch said seven minutes had elapsed. He communed with garbage and rats, got to know the pigeons and the cockroaches and only an hour or two later, the rest of the fifteen minutes was over.
Dvora opened the fire door and waved him in. She’d stuffed her hair up under a Raider’s baseball cap and got rid of her vest and bra. She wore sandals instead of the heels she’d been wearing before. Her slacks were cuffed up so they looked like Capri pants or pedal pushers or whatever in the hell they were calling them now.
The bad stucco on the outside of the hotel covered cinder block construction. All the older buildings in the City had been retrofitted to meet the quake standards, so structurally it was strong. The stairs were stressed concrete over steel. There wasn’t as much trash on the landings as he thought there would be, but the place smelled of old puke and new pee. The security light in its steel cage was burned out on the first floor and missing in the one above that and burning bright on their floor.
Dvora led him to room 316, two away from the stairwell. The door was heavy, a steel, fire door that would take a good amount of kicking in. She opened the door with a steel key, bolted the door and jumped into his arms.
She quickly pushed him away and said, “I’ve got ideas, but I’ve got to move fast to buy supplies.”
He spluttered, “Hold on, let’s sit down and put together a plan and…”
She interrupted and said, “I trusted you. Now you trust me. I want to move before they broadcast actual pictures of us. If I’m gone any longer than an hour it means… I’d rather not think about what it means. The signal to let me in will be two quick knocks, pause then three quick, okay?”
Now she was a secret agent.
“Hold on. Do you have enough cash to pay for your supplies?”
“Damn it!” The only time in her life she had ever had to be concerned about money was when she made the choice to cut ties to her family.
She smiled and asked, in a high-pitched, whiney voice, “Honey, can I have some money to go shopping?”
The woman was insane. It took seconds to pull bills from different stacks, crumple them up, and spread them around the floor with their shoes. He let her out the door and locked it behind her.
Their new home was a treat. New-looking fire sprinkler heads stuck down through the recently sprayed ceiling. He would bet dollars to rubles there were only enough pipes connected to cover the ass of the inspector they bribed to look the other way. The bed sagged so bad it looked like the invisible man was having a nap. The mirror in what passed for the bathroom was like something from a circus fun house. He always wanted to look that thin. The toilet was so stained he wouldn’t let his dog drink from it, if he had a dog.
The old TV, surprise, surprise, was missing its remote. Jack and Dvora were the lead story on every local news channel and most of the nationals.
The first picture of Dvora was as Prima Ballerina for the San Francisco Ballet, next in her role as choreographer and mistress of dance, and then as spokesperson and fund-raiser for the local performing arts community. The last picture showed her in a black and white outfit much like the one she wore when she walked into his office an hour and seventeen minutes earlier. Her hair was shorter now. Wherever she’d been when the picture was taken, she’d worn makeup nearly heavy enough for the stage. The caption below read:
“…Dvora Rebecca Schacter, age thirty-eight, is approximately five feet three inches tall and weighs one hundred and fifteen pounds. She has dark brown, almost black, hair, which is now approximately chin length. Her eyes are light brown and she has no visible scars or other distinguishing marks. It is believed that she is being held against her will by Jack McDonald and that she is not an accessory to the brutal murder of Donald O’Hare…”
More blah, blah, blah and then there were pictures of Jack. The caption said it was a repeat and instructed the public to pay close attention before listing the 1-888-CRIMEGO phone number to call with information. The first picture was right after he graduated from Ranger school.
I looked young and stupid! He thought.
The pictures progressed through the years until the last one. It must have been taken by one of the paparazzi outside Meghan’s house on the morning of the attack. The photographer managed to catch him looking up through his brows as he plowed through the crowd, running to the hospital. The picture made him look dangerous. Hell, he was dangerous, and getting more so by the minute.
The story changed again to show the shooting scene and the word MANHUNT appeared. Words scrolled across the bottom of the screen.
“…Jack McDonald is thirty-nine years old, six feet and one-half inches tall and weighs two hundred and twenty-five pounds. He has a weathered appearance, dark brown hair worn short, turning gray at the temples. He has gray eyes and numerous scars on his lower and upper back and back of his legs from war wounds. He has a black ink tattoo of the Latin Phrase “De oppresso liber” tattooed on his right shoulder…”
The reporter had it wrong. It wasn’t black ink. It was graphite lubricant for their weapons, all they had at the time. The team was shot up. Offah Neuffi did a great job considering he was lettering the old Samoan way and left-handed. There wasn’t much left of his right hand. He’d dip the weighted bamboo needle head into the lubricant and tapped it into the outline he’d drawn onto Jack’s shoulder with a Sharpie. It hurt like hell, but not enough to block out the pain from the shrapnel in his legs and back. The team was in a place they couldn’t be in, so they couldn’t call for extraction.
The A-team had learned to live together so it was appropriate they would die together because they couldn’t let themselves be captured… Shit, he’d missed some of the caption.
“…he is thought to be armed with the revolver he is believed to have used to kill Donald O’Hare. He is an excellent shot with a handgun and is known to have killed many times while in the military. Jack McDonald is an advanced black belt practitioner of one of the more lethal forms of Judo. He is described as freakishly strong by the students from his dojo and is considered too dangerous for even standard units of our local police to handle. Remember the number to call is 1-888-CRIMEGO. This just in: Mrs. O’Hare, the widow of Donald O’Hare, is offering a reward of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of her husband’s killer or killers.”
Jack was now the target of every law enforcement officer around who needed to prove his manhood or her womanhood. He wondered if the enemy had a direct connection into Captain Yan’s office. If they did he might as well take out the Sig and blow the top of his head off. He was beside the door, locked and loaded before he’d consciously registered the sound of the stairs creaking. He pushed his ear hard against the door and heard drunken talk in Cantonese from at least three different male voices. He watched through the peephole as the group stumbled by.
He and Dvora were on every station. He happened on CNN Headline News just as they ran video. They’d used film of him breaking one of his opponent’s arms in a Judo tournament next to video of Dvora dancing the lead in Romeo and Juliet. It was Beauty and the Beast, wasn’t it? Anyone looking at the picture would be sure he was a murderer and kidnapper and Dvora his hostage.