Poisonfeather (Gibson Vaughn #2)(81)
“No . . . ,” Gibson said. “Way.”
Then he did a happy dance in his seat that resembled an upright seizure more than anything and punched the steering wheel in celebration. The car behind him interrupted, honking for him to get a move on. Gibson made a right, pulled into the service station, and heard the signal diminish in intensity. Good—the four antennae spread across the roof of the van were already doing their jobs, triangulating the signal and pinpointing its direction. The alarm was telling him this wasn’t it, which left two possibilities. He scrambled back to the laptop in its dock, his exhaustion forgotten in an adrenaline surge, and scrolled through the data.
There was the phone number, pinging away.
The Stingray led him out of town, such as it was, down a long featureless road. He followed it for a mile until the signal began to weaken, then doubled back and crawled along the side of the road with his hazards on, listening to the tone of the alarm and looking for a turnoff that he might have missed. There wasn’t one; he saw only solid woodland in both directions. But the signal was definitely coming from the east. He consulted his map and found a road that ran perpendicular to the one he was on. He went to the crossroad and took a right.
The signal was stronger now, and the Stingray chirped away happily. The homes here all had a healthy footprint, with driveways spaced out every hundred yards or so. He pulled up at a plain white ranch-style home. A unmowed lawn, but otherwise it looked unremarkable. He checked the laptop. No mistake. The cell phone was inside.
Gibson stared at the house, trying to decide what to do now. He’d been so focused on finding the house that he hadn’t considered what to do if he actually did. Nothing wrong with the direct approach, he reckoned, so he went to the door and knocked. He waited and then knocked harder. He rang the bell. Finally, he went back down the walk and made his way around the side of the house, checking the windows, which all had the shades drawn. Around back, he came upon an elevated deck. At the foot of the stairs, a dead bird lay peacefully in the tall grass. He stepped over it and went up slowly, pausing by a rusted grill to look for movement through the sliding glass door. Nothing. The only other furniture on the deck was an old aluminum chaise longue with green-and-white webbing. A metal bucket that might once have held a citronella candle was now an overflow of crushed-out cigarettes. Mixed with rainwater, over time the butts had stained the deck a soggy yellow. Empty beer and liquor bottles lay nearby where they’d been discarded.
Cupping his hands to the glass, Gibson peered into the dark house. The room was a combination kitchen and living area, divided by a kitchen island. In one corner sat a desk and an office chair with a computer and precarious stacks of papers. In the center of the room stood a wide leather armchair, and in the chair, a pasty white man in boxer shorts stared blankly at an enormous flat-screen television. The television was off. The man was emaciated, bones propping up his skin like an abandoned circus tent. Gibson rapped on the glass to get the man’s attention but saw no movement apart from a slow, steady blinking.
Gibson tested the door, found it unlocked, and slid it open. A rancid, flatulent smell stung his eyes. He asked if he could come in but got no answer. He weighed his options. Everything about the man unnerved him, far more than if it had been some burly thug with gun. He felt a superstitious tickle at the back of his neck, as if he were trespassing in a graveyard. But he’d come a long way for this, and he commanded himself to get it together.
“I’m going to come in,” he announced and stepped across the threshold. Still no response. If the man in the chair had a gun, Gibson would be a dead burglar. It wouldn’t take a jury an hour to exonerate his killer. He left the door open for ventilation and as a potential escape route.
“So how are we doing today?” he asked, not expecting an answer but needing to fill the vacuum.
He worked his way slowly around the perimeter of the room, giving the man in the chair a wide berth. Despite the smell, the place was remarkably tidy. Not clean—a layer of dust and grime coated every surface—but tidy. More than tidy, it was bare essentials and no more. Nothing hung on the walls. No plants, no decorations or personal touches anywhere. It reminded Gibson of his own apartment. A depressing thought. In the kitchen, he found the source of the smell—a half-dozen trash bags, full to spilling over, sat propped against a wall in a row. The man had taken the time to empty his trash but not to walk the trash out to the curb for pickup. A stalagmite of empty pizza boxes suggested it had been some time since he’d ventured outdoors at all. Gibson checked the chair again, but the man remained statue still.
What little Gibson knew about drugs, he knew from the movies and a guy in his unit who’d been court-martialed for a heroin addiction, but the kitchen counter looked like Amsterdam at Christmas. In the center stood an ornate green bong. Arrayed around it, like presents for all the good little addicts, were little Baggies of pills, powders, and crystals. A glass pipe with a bulb blackened from use listed on its side. Razor blades, matches, a crooked spoon—the man hadn’t missed a trick.
At the desk, Gibson tapped the space bar, and the monitor flickered to life. Amazingly, there was no password prompt, and it took him to a portal page for a brokerage account on the Bursa Malaysia—the Malaysian stock market. Lea had been right on the nose. The barbarians are at your gate, Charles. Gibson tapped the space bar again idly while he stared at the blinking cursor prompting him for the username and password for the brokerage account. It wouldn’t be stored on the machine locally, so he couldn’t change it the way he’d changed the password at the Virginia State motor pool. There wasn’t anything remotely like enough time to hack the Malaysian brokerage, so if he couldn’t find it written down somewhere, that whittled his options down to one: pry it out of the man in the chair. But how was he going to manage that? He’d never social-engineered a zombie before. Instead, he started with a quick search of the desk—under the keyboard and through all the drawers—in case it was taped somewhere helpfully. The hacking equivalent of flipping down a car’s visor and having the keys drop into your hand. Wishful thinking, but of course it wouldn’t be that easy. He set about a more thorough search of the desk.