Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(73)
On the way to the bookstore in the Fashion Island shopping complex in Newport Beach, Bibi couldn’t stop wondering why she had not asked Halina Berg two important questions. The first: Have you ever heard of Robert Warren Faulkner? The second: Have you ever heard of Ashley Bell? They were the two key figures in this drama, after all; the girl was in urgent need of being rescued, and the mother-murdering Bobby was intent on preventing her from being found. Bibi had assumed that Dr. St. Croix had wanted to speak with Mrs. Berg to explore the connection between Nazis and the occult, but that might not have been her intention. Whatever mysterious faction she aligned with, whatever her purpose in this madness, the professor might have been under the impression that the survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz could tell her something related to Faulkner or Bell, or both. Even if Mrs. Berg claimed never to have heard of them, there would have been something to be gained by watching her reactions to the names.
Not that there had been any reason to believe that Halina’s history might be different from the one that she had laid out in her cozy kitchen. She’d been credible. Even if she was not the Holocaust survivor that she claimed to be, she was a lover of books, therefore not likely to have anything in common with a man who said that he hated most books and bookish people. Besides, had she been aligned with Faulkner/Terezin, she would have let him know that the woman he wanted to kill was sitting at her kitchen table drinking tea.
If Bibi couldn’t be sure that she had gotten from Halina Berg all the woman had to give, she was convinced that she had missed something during her encounter with Chubb Coy in the third-floor Victorian suite in St. Croix’s house, and that it had to do less with what he’d revealed than with how he’d said it. There had been certain familiar statements and phrases, and now her memory began to serve her better than it had earlier, which was why she needed to visit a bookstore.
As she exited the toll road at Jamboree Boulevard, crawling west in heavy traffic, Bibi heard the start-up music that indicated her laptop had come alive. It was lying on the passenger seat. After searching for the photos of Bobby Faulkner, she had logged off and her computer had shut down. Now she flipped up the screen and found it bright, ready to go.
When the westbound lanes clogged, she used the touch pad to try to log off. The laptop remained on. She reached farther, to the power switch, clicked it, clicked it, but it didn’t work.
Not good. In fact, very bad.
Ten minutes from Fashion Island in that stop-and-go traffic, she came to a halt when a traffic light yellowed to red, with ten or twelve vehicles in front of her. Directly ahead idled a landscaper’s open-bed truck full of mowers, blowers, trimmers, rakes, and white tarps plump with grass clippings.
She didn’t want to do what she knew she was going to do, what she believed she had to do. After she tried the power button twice again, without success, she closed the laptop, opened the car door, got out, and hurried forward to the open-bed truck. She flung the computer over the tailgate, darted back to the Honda, got behind the wheel, and pulled shut the door without looking at any of the people in the cars around her, who might have been interested in knowing what she’d just done and why. Let them wonder. It was California; you never knew what anyone might do next.
She had hoped the laptop would tumble in among the gardener’s equipment, but it landed smack in the middle of one of the large marshmallow-looking tarps bulging with clippings. As if it were on display.
The traffic signal didn’t change fast enough to suit her. She couldn’t guess what might happen next, but she knew for sure that when the big boot came down, aimed at your neck, it was better to be on the move than sitting still.
Did the latest models of computers emit an identifying signal even when they were switched off? Could someone in authority reach out to that signal and activate your laptop? The newest model TVs included cameras that watched the viewer and microphones that could listen, to allow interactive entertainment. It was a negative-option component; you got it whether you wanted it or not, and you had to take active steps to cancel those features. Not that it necessarily disconnected when you were told it did. Who knew? If someone in authority could reach out and switch on your laptop, and if the laptop contained a transponder with an identifying number, then it was like a flashing neon sign announcing HERE SHE IS, COME AND GET HER!
The signal turned from red to green, and traffic began to move, but Bibi thought it would probably never again, for as long as she lived, move as fast as she wanted. The throng of vehicles, spaced like beads on a necklace, progressed as far as the next intersection, at the crown of a hill, before halting again. She was now six or eight places from the commanding light, and the landscaper’s truck remained in front of her.
She heard the bass throbbing only a moment before the helicopter soared over the brow of the hill, immense in visual impact if not in fact, flying about sixty or seventy feet above the roadway, far below legal minimum altitude for the circumstances. It wasn’t a standard two-or four-seat police chopper, and it wasn’t a humongous military job, but rather a sleek blue-and-white corporate craft, what Pax would call a “medium twin,” powered by two engines, with an eight-or nine-passenger capacity. High-set main and tail rotors. Advanced glass cockpit. Maybe eight or nine thousand pounds of machine and fuel, coming at her like a missile, framed in her windshield, seeming lower than it actually was. The engine noise and the air-slam of the rotary wing escalated instantly to a violent roar as the chopper passed overhead, then diminished as it swept downhill, above the lanes of waiting vehicles.