The Chaos Kind (John Rain #11)(72)

There was a soft tap at the door, and he was instantly awake. He stood, padded over, and looked through the peephole. It was Dox and Livia. He checked his watch. Not quite six.

He unbolted and opened the door. “Everything all right?”

“Fresh intel,” Dox said quietly. “Sorry to wake you.”

“I don’t sleep. Come on in.”

He closed and bolted the door behind them. Diaz was already awake and sitting up. “Is everything okay?” she said.

“Everything’s fine,” Livia said. “New information from Kanezaki. He located Schrader. We need to decide what to do about it.”

“Bunking down on the floor,” Dox said to Diaz. “I see you’ve been taking lessons from Mr. Larison. And let me tell you, you could do a lot worse for a teacher.”

They pulled the mattress back onto the box spring and sat across from each other on the two beds, Dox next to Livia, Larison next to Diaz. “First of all,” Dox said, “John and Delilah landed outside Washington. Manus made it back, too. John and Delilah ran into some opposition picking up Manus’s woman, Evie, and his boy, Dash, but they’re all together and everyone’s fine.”

“Opposition?” Diaz said. “You mean that UPS driver Manus was worried about?”

Dox nodded. “Apparently so. There were two of them, and when they couldn’t find Manus’s people at his house, they showed up looking for them at the school where Evie teaches and Dash is a student. Sounds like John got there just in time, though I gather Evie and Dash acquitted themselves well. Anyway, now it’s two fewer we’re up against, and that’s always good. But the main thing now is Schrader. Whoever took him is holding him in a house. In a place called Lake Tapps.”

Diaz looked at Livia. “That’s twenty miles from here.”

Livia nodded. “That’s right.”

“What do we do?” Diaz said. “Call the marshals?”

“That’s one possibility,” Livia said. “We’re considering something else.”

Larison had a notion of what something else might be. He doubted he was going to like it. “What do we know about where he’s being kept?” he said.

“It’s just an Airbnb place,” Dox said. “Detached single-family house, backed by woods, rented yesterday morning.”

“Who’s guarding him?”

“Three men. We don’t know their backgrounds, but we can assume they’re capable.”

Larison didn’t respond to that. It was his habit to assume everyone was capable, until after he’d killed them. “Countermeasures?”

“No way to be sure, but unlikely to be anything extensive. Feels like a hurry-up operation.”

“Hmmm,” Larison said. “That sounds familiar.”

Dox laughed. “Fair. Still, it’s good to get a little corroboration that busting Schrader out of jail was a Plan B. We’re not the only ones improvising here.”

Larison wouldn’t have admitted it, but he liked being around Dox because, in addition to being extremely capable, the man was always cheerful. Even when—especially when—the shit hit the fan. But at the moment he seemed a little too eager. Larison figured he must have gotten laid. He wasn’t picking up anything from Livia, but she tended to be more of a closed book. Well, he was happy for them. But that had nothing to do with the matter at hand.

Diaz looked at Dox. “How does Kanezaki know this?”

“You promise not to tell anyone?” Dox said, his expression mock-serious.

Diaz nodded.

Dox shrugged. “Okay, I’d call that officially top-secret cleared. So here’s the deal. To keep us all safe, the government developed a program called Guardian Angel. It was originally called God’s Eye, but that upset the civil libertarians among us, so the people behind the program changed the name. The government always starts off with bad names, I don’t know why. Carnivore, Total Information Awareness . . . I mean, the Defense Department was originally called the War Department, which seemed to be giving people the idea it was responsible for fighting wars or something. And then—”

“How does Kanezaki know?” Larison said. He was familiar with Dox’s occasionally discursive style.

“Right, right. Anyway, Guardian Angel sucks in all the electronic exhaust we modern humans emit in our daily lives—what we search for on the Internet, use credit cards for, who we call, who we associate with, where our cellphones go . . . everything. It’s how old Rispel knew you like to jog in the morning at Freeway Park.”

“Jesus,” Diaz said.

“Yeah, it’s a powerful tool, no doubt. But Kanezaki has a young tech whiz—Maya, the one whose friend got killed last night—who built some kind of back door into the system, so Kanezaki could see what other people were searching for, and particularly what searches were getting deleted in violation of what passes for the law these days. That’s how he uncovered the plot to take you out, and how he knew to send Larison and me in to foil it.”

Diaz shook her head. “I can’t believe this shit goes on.”

“I know, it’s a lot to get your head around. But like Blade said, ‘The world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping.’”

Diaz looked at him, obviously not getting the reference.