Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(73)

Peter got back in the car. “Too tight to just walk in,” he said. “A good choice, actually. Come and go in your car, use the garage, never meet your neighbors. You’re two miles from the freeway, the surface streets are a tangle, and there are three or four marinas within five miles. Unless they catch you walking out your door, you’re a ghost.”

June said, “You really should be on one of those real estate shows on cable TV.” She deepened her voice. “‘This condo is ideal for the intelligent criminal. Note the multiple exits for a quick escape, and easy access to mass transit in case of government surveillance.’”

“You could learn a thing or two,” he said. “You’re living some kind of invisible life yourself.”

“I’m just trying not to have my dad show up on my doorstep.”





37





Back on Highway 99, Peter drove north toward the next address. Four lanes of low-rent commercial strip, auto parts, gun shops, and sporting goods. June was on her laptop again, still inside the law firm’s server.

“I’m sorting Nicolet’s files by date,” she said. “Correlating with his emails to my mom. Maybe he wrote a report to his client.”

“Or the client signed a contract,” said Peter. “That would be in there, too, right?”

“Gotta be somewhere,” she said. “There’s an awful lot of work product here. This guy’s a beast. I’m going to be reading all night.”

Peter glanced over at her. “All night?”

“Well,” she said, eyes still on the laptop. “Maybe not all night.”

“You could ask Tyg3r,” he said. “Is it smart enough to make those correlations?”

“I doubt it,” she said. “What would I ask it to find?”

Peter turned left. “Fucked if I know,” he said. “That’s your area, not mine.”

“What is your area, exactly?”

He grinned. “Get the bad guys,” he said. “Save the girl.”

“So I’m the brains of the outfit?”

“I thought you knew that already. If you didn’t, maybe I’m wrong.”

She smiled at her laptop. “I was just being polite.”

Peter saw a gas station ahead. “I’m going to fuel up.”

She looked at the gauge. “We still have half a tank.”

“Rule number one when you’re on the run,” he said. “Never get below half a tank. And if you’re a girl, never pass up the chance to pee.”

“That’s sexist.”

He shrugged, pulling into the gas station. “I can pee anywhere. In an old soda bottle, while you drive, if I have to. Can you do that?”

“Why would I want to?” she asked. “But maybe I’ll use the bathroom for a minute, while I have the chance.”

She went inside and Peter called Lewis.

“What’s up?”

“I got a first name on the ex-husband.”

“About time, Jarhead. We can narrow it down.”

“Oh, it’s already narrowed down,” said Peter. “The name is Sasha. Sasha Kolodny.”

There was a pause at the other end of the line.

“You’re shitting me. Sasha Kolodny? As in, Sasquatch? The Mad Billionaire? Man, you in deep doo-doo now.”

Sasha Kolodny was an early employee of a certain giant Seattle software company. A notable eccentric in an industry known for eccentrics, Sasha Kolodny was a bearded giant who earned the nickname Sasquatch because of his tendency to wander off into the steep evergreen forest that surrounded Seattle. Apparently he said it helped him think. His net worth including stock options was once reported at over a billion dollars.

In the mid-1990s, Kolodny left the company and used his fortune to launch a new business focused on, if Peter remembered correctly, the technology of sustainability. Hardware, not software. Renewable energy, urban agriculture, that kind of thing. Good ideas, but apparently ahead of their time in the boom years of conspicuous consumption. When the dot-com bubble popped, the whole enterprise went down in flames, taking most of his fortune with it. Kolodny went some flavor of crazy and disappeared. His story resurfaced from time to time in the media, both legend and cautionary tale. The intersection of genius, commerce, finance, and mental instability.

Peter’s knowledge of the man was limited to an article he’d read in Wired magazine years ago. The writer had made a comparison to Howard Hughes, and called Kolodny “one of the principal architects of the modern world.”

The title of the article was “The Mad Billionaire.”

Peter said, “What do you know about him?”

“Prob’ly no more’n you do. Let me look him up.” Peter heard the clicking of the keyboard.

“I don’t have long,” said Peter. June would be back from the bathroom any minute.

“Hold on, Jarhead. Let’s see. Yeah, here’s a ‘where is he now’ article, they interviewed some people who knew him. ‘Brilliant, very driven, and very private.’”

Lewis stopped talking, and Peter knew he was reading.

“Seems like something happened to him in the late nineties. Nobody really knows what, but he really changed. He got manic, obsessed, paranoid. Says here, ‘His focus on sustainability was rooted in his obsession with the collapse of civilization.’ Huh,” said Lewis. “Never knew the man was such a whack job.”