Chapter 73
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How could Dvora turn herself in without making it a setup for Jack? She would have to turn herself in far enough away that it would be hard to track her back to him. She couldn’t get on an airplane without showing good ID. She could take a bus, but he would almost rather get caught than have her go to the Greyhound station. If he had that much trouble picturing Dvora Schacter, former Prima Ballerina for the San Francisco Ballet, getting on a Greyhound, maybe the cops would, too?
“I know I need to put some space between us before I turn myself in. I was thinking the bus station, but the cops watch it so closely for runaways, chickenhawks, dealers and such, that I think not. What about buying a car and driving out of town?”
Damn she was a smart woman. What other ways were there? Amtrak! They could take BART under the Bay to Emeryville and then get on Amtrak to… They didn’t need to go anywhere. Dvora needed to go somewhere.
He helped Dvora turn herself back into a girl. If she stayed in character as a gay man it might give away his disguise to a very smart cop, or an extremely smart cop like Yan. So they turned her into a slut, which somehow made him even hotter. Now what they had done didn’t feel excusable. How could he have had sex with her knowing people were dying, knowing he was in love with another woman? As she didn’t make eye contact he knew she was asking herself the same thing.
JACK LIKED being alone. But, when Dvora walked out that door, he felt more alone than he ever wanted to be. She had paid cash for the room for a week. That didn’t mean he was safe. The owner would rat out him out in a microsecond to keep John Law off his back.
He thought about how much he wanted Lee by his side. He thought about what an asshole he must be to bring the woman he loved into this mess. He thought about how to contact Bob. He had the cell phones, but also had more than strict instructions not to use them. He had the laptop. Knowing Bob, the IP address was for a Jane Doe in Spokane, Washington and should be safe. But, Bob said not to use it.
Bob had folded a piece of paper inside the laptop. It had a free webmail address and a password and a note that the present he bought to make Meghan smile would be delivered. He had memorized the email address and password and burned the piece of paper right after they got into the hotel room. When he could, he would find a free wireless hub and try to contact Bob. He picked up the laptop, thinking that he needed a saddlebag to carry it in to complete his cowboy outfit, grabbed the old-fashioned key and headed out the door.
He took a roundabout route toward the corner of Waverly and Clay. It was only a few blocks to the Caffeine Central there. They all provided free Wi-Fi. He needed his mocha anyway. He put both the cell phones in the pockets of his leather jacket. Why hadn’t Bob called? Why hadn’t Lee called? Did he want her to call? Hell yes, he wanted her to call. He wanted her with him, no matter what. He wasn’t going to take her with him on the final assault, but he wanted her with him now.
Why hadn’t they called? He tried to ignore the locals and stay in character, when what he really wanted to do was run back to the hotel room and tear off the disguise. The only thing that stopped him was the knowledge certain that only a crazy cop would think that Jack McDonald, slightly overweight ex-paratrooper and fugitive with a price on his head, would try to hide by turning himself into six feet five inch butch cowboy. It still felt like there was a neon sign over his head saying “Look at me, look at me!” He winked at the occasional pretty boy for practice. He practiced the walk, wished he had peed before the walk and finally made it to Caffeine Central.
There was the usual line with a mix of tourists, Chinese, and people slumming from Nob Hill. He flirted with the cashier. The boy did have very pretty eyes. The cashier wrote a phone number on the back of the receipt when he slid it across the counter. He brushed the boy’s hand as he picked up the receipt and waited for a table in the back.
He couldn’t just search for the news he wanted. He would have to search for a ton of other news and hope the Feds didn’t have the computing power to spot all searches associated with the stocks. What a silly thought. The Feds had all the money they needed and more. They had hundreds of thousands of his dollars on a bad year and much more on a good one. He could do a search from the library, but he knew the bad guys had good thinkers. They would know what information he was looking for.
There was another way to do it. That would be to sign in at libraries and Internet café’s around town and look for the information in little pieces. Shit, he couldn’t use the libraries because he didn’t have an ID! He made a mental note that if by some overwhelming violation of odds he lived through this, he would never live life without a bolt-hole and at least two different rock-solid identities.
The computer found the wireless hub. He opened the anonymous webmail program. No mail. No messages and no way to contact Bob without putting him at risk. Then there was mail. From Lee!
My love,
Do not use the cell phones. Get rid of them after you destroy them. Hide the pieces well. Don’t use this laptop again. There should be a program in your applications to overwrite every part of the hard-drive with ones and zeros. Use it and then destroy the hard drive. Buy a throwaway phone and call 7145551212.
I love you three!
Lee
She loved him three! Because saying “I love you too” wasn’t enough. He read the message over and over. He didn’t bother to delete it. He knew that until he overwrote the hard drive, the deleted information could still be recovered. He signed off and left as fast as he could while still appearing to move purposelessly. He wanted to hear Lee’s voice so badly. He had to stop himself from running. He slowed down to his cowpoke strut.
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The store had Virgin Mobile and a no-name brand he had never heard of. He hated standing in front of the security camera buying a phone, but he didn’t want to draw attention to himself paying someone to buy the phone for him. He paid $97 cash for the Virgin phone. The five blocks back to the hotel felt like five miles.
He let himself into the room, plugged the phone in and set it up as fast as he could. It still took fifteen long minutes before he could dial Lee’s number. There were three ordinary rings and then a few clicks and two more rings before he heard:
“This is Joan Bond!”
For some reason it took a couple of tries before he could tell her he was agent Forest Gump. When he did his voice cracked.
He thought they’d lost the connection. He heard sniffing in the background.
“Do you have a cold, agent Bond?”
She ignored his question and said, “Don’t be an asshole. And, why is there a catch in your voice, Forest? Where are you?”
He told her.
“What’s the room number again?” She asked.
He told her. There were a few seconds silence.
“Say something, please. I have to hear your voice.”
She said something. “I should be there in about seven hours. Don’t worry about me and don’t believe anything you see or hear in the news. I’m traveling under a different name. Get rid of the phone you just used. Buy another one. If you have to call me, call 212 555-1212, but only if you have to. Did you memorize the number?”
“I love you three and yes,” he said.
“I miss you so much. I’ll be there as quickly as is safe.”
She hung up. It was going to be a long seven hours.
JACK WAITED FOR an hour and ten minutes and then bought another phone at a Radio Shack. He ran the ones and zeros overwrite for the hard drive while sitting at another Caffeine Central. He dropped bits and pieces of the laptop into various trash bins and sewers on the way to Radio Shack. He walked to an Internet café before he logged on and scanned the news as fast and as randomly as he could.
The cabal had been pushed off the front page of Bay Area papers and the web by a new serial killer. He had killed and dismembered three little girls. At least they had discovered three so far. He had used one of the girl’s hands as fishing bait. Another little girl’s ear had been discovered, found in a shark’s belly by a sport fisherman. The story made Jack wish he were still top of the fold.
Jack sauntered back to the hotel and waited a few more years before he checked news on TV. He had at least three hours to go. He scanned the channels quickly, took off the too tight clothes and did pushups, chair dips, crunches, airplanes, sit-ups, bridges, levitation lunges, doorjamb pull-ups, planks, and burpees. When finished, he gasped for breath and shook with exhaustion, but he made it through another hour. He stretched and cooled down for a half hour. After a quick, brown shower, he sat down and brainstormed on paper with a pencil. Only two hours to go. He flipped the TV on again.
“… Hong Lee. She was the granddaughter of legendary Hong Lin Pao, Hong Kong businessman and rumored retired head of the Three Dragons Triad. Friends and enemies alike know Pao as “Uncle Chin.” The Royal Canadian Mounted Police say she was apparently the victim of a kidnapping gone wrong in a hotel outside the airport in Vancouver, Canada just a few hours ago. Witnesses say she was abducted. Her body was then discovered quite by accident in a waste container whose contents were due to be incinerated. The container was searched because a local art collector’s maid had inadvertently thrown out a priceless piece of modern art she assumed was the art patron’s granddaughter’s crayon drawing.”
“Hong Lee is known to have been involved with Jack McDonald, who is now a fugitive and sought by the police, FBI, and other government agencies for his part in the murder of Donald O’Hare, as well as insider trading, conspiracy and…”
Jack dialed 212 555-1212 as fast as he could. If Lee were dead he would kill so many of the motherfuckers they would need armies of accountants to count the bodies.
The canned voicemail message told him to leave his number. He started to leave a message and then stopped and disconnected. If the love of his life was dead, the cops had the phone and would ID the number. They would find out where it had been manufactured and then where it was shipped to and, eventually, where it was sold. They would trace it to a store in San Francisco and see Jack’s picture, the way he looked now, on the security cameras. Leaving a message would simply tell them he was alive and somewhere with a phone. He picked up the phone and punched in 212-55… There was a knock on the door.
He made it to the door in seconds and looked through the peephole. A shriveled old Asian woman stared in. In the center of her beautiful brown eye, gold flecks seemed to swim together until they lit up the world. He nearly tore the door of its hinges opening it, snatched her inside and held her too hard.
“Put me down big, white queer,” she said in an old crone’s voice. He held her as they watched the news. She cried as she watched the story of her death on TV. Then the stream of curses started, first Cantonese, then Mandarin and finally English.
“She was my cousin. We were best friends when we were little.”
Jack expected her to say more then, but she didn’t. He held the piece of himself that had been missing for so long as she cried for her cousin. It was ten minutes before she spoke again. “They’ll compare her prints to the passport and find out she isn’t me.”
Lee pushed herself away and stood, pulled off the wig, and stretched her back. He could see the force of will it took to put aside her grief.
“Who did the make-up, Dvora?” she asked as she shed her costume.
He nodded.
“What was the plan?”
He told her.
She looked at him and the stuff that was left from Dvora’s changes in appearance. “I think it’s a good plan. Let me get my head straight and then we can get out of the City.” With that she rested her head against his chest and was asleep in seconds.
DVORA WASN’T the only one with theatrical experience. When Lee was done with her own makeover she looked so much like a pretty Asian boy it scared him.
“If you hadn’t married that gold-digging bitch, I wouldn’t have had time for theatre at Stanford, you dumb fuck,” she said as she touched up his cowboy outfit. They were now what was a caricature in the Bay Area, a large Caucasian man and his hot Asian boyfriend. He took digital pictures of Lee and they headed for the center of China Town, stopping at a CVS to print the pictures. The weather cooperated and the crowd was heavy. They sat at the little café on the corner that was rumored to serve decent Cantonese food.
Lee put down a pot sticker and said in a lisping voice, “They used rancid oil when they cooked these.”
Jack practiced his hard-ass act, glaring at everyone who came close to making eye contact, as if he was spoiling for a fight. It was easy to stare down the tourists, a little tougher with the natives, and toughest of all with the occasional cop.
He’d never noticed this many cops before. He hadn’t paid much attention to the new community-policing thing. It was supposed to take the cops out of the station and put them on the streets. Or, it was paranoia.
Jack finally spotted him. He had the China Town gangster look down, from the aviator sunglasses down to his Gucci loafers and everything in between. Two different groups approached him. The first, three Chinese women, handed him a slim envelope. The two Americanized Chinese girls wore all the right labels, but the third wore no-name aerobics shoes, and a sweatshirt from an American university that didn’t exist. And, she wasn’t as carefully groomed as the other two. The gangster opened the envelope after he turned away from the crowd, turned back to them and holding up a finger and said “One hour!” in Cantonese.
The timeline made it seem like something other than drugs. If it was a drug deal the gangster would have been holding or send a runner for the goods in a lot less than an hour. With Jack’s command of Cantonese, the gangster could have been saying ‘Thanks for the recipe.’ Why didn’t any of the immigrants from China speak the national language? He learned Mandarin so he could deal with the world’s biggest economy. The written language was all the same. Fortunately Cantonese was Lee’s birth tongue. He glanced over and she nodded.
JACK AND LEE wandered for a while and then came back to take coffee nearby. The girls came back in fifty minutes and loitered nervously. As they walked by with the envelope the one who’d just gotten off the boat snuck a look and said, in good English, “This picture makes me look fat.”
Bingo. A group of four Hispanic males walked up to the China town gangster and handed him an envelope. Two looked like they were using heavy.
When the gangster pulled open the envelope, he closed it quick, and tossed it back to them.
“No dinero, no deal.”
The group tried to argue and three huskier, older Chinese men wearing jackets baggy enough to hide rocket launchers, materialized out of the crowd. The Hispanic men left quickly.
Lee watched like a pointer following quail. They let the gangster calm down for a few minutes. Jack followed Lee, trying the walk, knowing he hadn’t made a street buy of anything illegal in over twenty years. Lee pranced up to the gangster hesitantly and spoke to him in lisping Cantonese. The gangster responded in English.
“Excuse please, I need papers, two sets, license for drive and … She stopped and turned toward him.
He said, “Insurance.”
There was quick Cantonese and the gangster hooked thumbs in his belt and held four fingers down on each hand and said, “Eight hundred dollars each.”
Jack said, “Bullshit!” He grabbed Lee’s arm, pulling her away.
The gangster laughed, then held down three fingers on each hand and said, “six hundred.”
Lee asked, “How much for real license for drive?”
“Not possible.”
“How much?”
“Two thousand. Each.”
Lee said, “Fifteen hundred.”
The gangster looked at his shoes, looked back up, ready to say no, when his attention was lost to the tall blonde teenage hooker smiling at him as she walked by.
“Thirty-five hundred for both.”
They gave him $2000 up front, the picture and the note card with the name spelled out as it was on the credit cards for Jack and Jimmy Yee for her. The card also had their approximate height and weight and altered hair color and addresses for what passed as middle-class neighborhoods in the Bay Area.
“An hour and a half,” he said, after he’d counted the money.
As they walked away, Jack turned to Lee, not needing to whisper because of the crowd noise. “You have balls the size of basketballs, for a fine sexy woman, that is.”