Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(17)

“No thanks. I’ve never been able to drink my dinner. Anyway, tell me who I’m following.”

He took a big glug of cold-pressed whatever. “Sure. But first, I really do need you to sign that document.”

Was he telling me everything? Of course not. Then again, they usually didn’t. With any luck I could make a decently quick job of it and leave my corporate espionage career behind.

I accepted the pen he handed me and reached for the papers.





11


Following another human being was both simple and incredibly complicated. Simple, because following was just a basic set of actions. Especially if someone didn’t suspect they were being followed. In a car, drive after them. On foot, walk after them. Get on the same bus. Sit in the same restaurant. Complicated, though, because people could be unpredictable and it was a big world, one that was increasingly easy to move around in. Someone could jump in a cab, go to an Amtrak or Greyhound station. Or an airport. A person could be thousands of miles away in a matter of hours.

And with a tail you only got one chance.

I’d lived in California my whole life but still didn’t really get Silicon Valley: an unplanned constellation of cities with San Jose roughly in the center. Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Mountain View, Milpitas, Palo Alto, Menlo Park. Each with the same bland little downtown strip of shops and restaurants. Impossible to tell when you had left one and reached another. Endless pavement, endless freeways. Building after building, vast glassy complexes, arid hills. Often passing signs for some household name, Yahoo!, eBay, Apple. More often passing a hundred names that meant nothing. They might someday. They might not.

Care4 was in Sunnyvale, a large building at the edge of a huge office park that must have held ten other companies. The motif seemed to be black tinted glass. A parking lot full of late-model cars. Tech paid. It was hotter than in Berkeley, away from the chilly breezes and fickle weather of the Bay. I started working my way through the parking lot. I had a make and a license plate, plus the employee, Karen Li, drove a distinctive car. A red Porsche Boxster convertible. License plate 5LA7340. I cruised up and down the rows. Not a small parking lot, but not huge. I wasn’t searching an airport lot with a hundred different lettered and numbered sections. I saw a red convertible but it was a Mustang. I drove down a few more rows and then I saw it. A little red roadster. Soft top, jaunty, fun to drive. At least as fun as anything else on four wheels. Cars had never been my thing. I stopped nearby and looked around. No one in sight, the employees hard at work inside. I strolled in the direction of the Boxster and dropped a pen I was holding as I walked past. It rolled near the back tire. I squatted down by the Boxster’s rear bumper, one hand fumbling for the pen, the other reaching under, toward the chassis. I felt the powerful magnet grip onto the metal underside of the car.

A minute later I was gone. I’d passed a little plaza on my way in. Nail salon, Starbucks, fast-food restaurants. I ordered iced coffee from the Starbucks, bought a newspaper, and settled in to wait.

Following someone used to mean turn by turn, but these days, an average civilian could buy products that would have made a Stasi agent sick with envy. Voice recorders and hidden cameras, keystroke loggers that recorded and transmitted every letter typed on a computer. And GPS trackers. I’d never felt the need to own a lot of the modern technology being sold. Not out of any deep philosophical belief. I just didn’t see how fitness trackers or toasters that connected to the Internet would make me happier. But technology had its uses. Instead of standing in eighty-degree heat with a pair of binoculars, I was sitting in an air-conditioned café working my way through my second iced coffee. The device I had used was barely bigger than a matchbox, enclosed in a weatherproof magnetic case. The batteries were good for close to a month and it transmitted to an old iPad Jess had given me. The display showed a map, and a dot on the map.

That dot meant Karen Li could no longer drive anywhere without me knowing exactly where she was.

I waited for almost three hours. We hit lunchtime and groups of people began filling the plaza. Almost all of them men between their twenties and fifties. Almost all of them white, Chinese, or Indian, in jeans and polo shirts with little laminated badges clipped to a belt or lanyard. Tens of thousands like them. Building whatever new world lay around the corner.

The lunch rush ended. The plaza quieted again. I was on my third coffee.

The iPad emitted a beep. The dot was moving.

I got up fast.

By the time the Boxster passed the plaza I was on my motorcycle, watching the road.

I pulled out behind the little red car.

She drove fast, headed north on the 101. We passed NASA’s vast Ames Research Center, the enormous airplane hangars looming with otherworldly dimension like something out of an H. G. Wells novel. Reaching Palo Alto I saw signs for Stanford University, and soon after for the SFO airport as we neared San Francisco. A billboard stated WRITE CODE. SAVE LIVES in happy, bright colors. Another, marked with a cute little sky-blue logo, advertised a cloud storage service that presumably was better than other cloud storage services. I stayed a couple of cars back and one lane over from the Boxster. It was midday and even though the freeway was, as always, packed with cars they moved quickly. That made it easier. When people drove, they focused on the road. When they sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic they fidgeted, craned their necks, looked around trying to figure out the holdup. Bored people became unintentionally observant.