Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(61)

I fumbled in my jeans and came out with a twenty. “Let me borrow it.”

The man looked at me suspiciously. “You’ll give it back?”

“Five minutes.”

It was probably the easiest money he had ever made. He handed over the screwdriver and walked back to his friends. They leaned against the wall and watched us.

“What was that about?” Jess wondered.

I kneeled down in front of the Range Rover and unscrewed the license plate. I pulled the thin metal rectangle away, thinking again of Mr. Berkovich and his flat, folded napkins.

Nothing.

I screwed the plate back on. Went to the rear bumper and did the same, prying the thin metal outward.

There was a white envelope flush against the black plastic of the license plate holder.

“Holy shit,” Jess said. “You were right.”

I reattached the plate and gave the guy back his screwdriver before we got back into the Range Rover. The white envelope had been wrapped in tight layers of plastic wrap. Waterproofing. Clever. Rental cars were washed constantly with high-pressure jets. I unpeeled the crinkled layers of plastic wrap and opened the envelope carefully. There was a stack of papers inside. Printouts done with a high-quality color printer. On each page was a photograph.

Faces.

The faces, both men’s and women’s, had been captured in everyday actions by what seemed a mix of security cameras and distance lenses. Most seemed on the younger side, somewhere between their twenties and forties. Nothing seemed to connect one face to the next. A range of ethnicities: white, black, South American, Middle Eastern. About thirty of them. A tall, bearded man wearing a backpack and sunglasses. A Slavic woman in her twenties, full lips and blue eyes, getting off a bus, face set watchfully. A man with a missing front tooth, sipping espresso at a sidewalk café. A college-age kid with a wispy mustache wearing aviators and a T-shirt. We flipped through more pictures. I could make out a few words in the background, signs for stores and streets and brands. Arabic, Cyrillic, and English, mostly.

“Who are they?”

We looked through more of the pictures. “I’m not sure.”

“The pictures look like law enforcement surveillance,” said Jess. “Could they be terrorists or criminals, you think? Like different cells? What do you think they’re planning?”

“I don’t know.” I checked the envelope once more and stopped, seeing ink on the inside. I pulled it apart. Two words: IN RETENTIS. Whatever e-mail Karen had gotten, whatever the FBI men had been looking for, I was holding it.

People will die. Innocent people.

Under the words were three numbers. 11/1.

A date less than one week away.

A milestone they’ve spent years trying to reach … and they’re almost there.

“Latin,” Jess said. “Which I dropped sophomore year of high school. What’s it mean?”

“In retentis. A legal term. Documents held back from a court’s regular records.”

Jess’s voice was uneasy. “Nikki. If they’re planning some kind of strike, you have to take these to the police. If a bomb goes off we’d both be complicit.”

“I know.”

Her voice grew still more uneasy. “If Karen Li knew about this, and if the people in these pictures found out that she knew…”

Again, I was silent. Again, I had been thinking the same thing.

“How do you find out for sure? Can you get to anyone else at the company?”

I thought. “There might be someone I can reach.”





32


I hadn’t seen Oliver since the day he’d pulled up to me at the gym to show me Gunn’s flight itineraries. The strange little man’s precautions while setting up our meeting were so elaborate that they might have been funny. Except Karen Li was dead. That made them not funny. I couldn’t blame him for being careful. I had thought about telling Mr. Jade and Mr. Ruby about both Oliver and the photographs, but something held me back. Part of it was that I trusted them about as much as I would any pair of strange men who had thrown me into the backseat of a car by way of a handshake. The fact that they were FBI agents didn’t do much to tip the scales, either. Law enforcement types were notorious for pursuing their own ends, which sometimes happened to parallel those of the people they dealt with, and sometimes did not. Our goals regarding Care4 might seem to align, but I wanted to learn more for myself before I shared. More importantly, they had let their star witness be murdered almost under their noses. Whether that was bad luck, indifference, or incompetence didn’t matter all that much. If Oliver learned I was working with them, that would be the end of that relationship, and the whole company might be spooked into lockdown.

There was another part, under the logic. I’d gotten used to relying on myself in life.

I’d fill in the FBI when I was good and ready, and not before.

Following Oliver’s instructions, I took a train to the San Francisco Ferry Building, getting there at one in the afternoon. The Ferry Building was a grand, rectangular building done in the Beaux Arts style, the exterior composed of a double series of arches, three large central arches supporting a clock tower rising hundreds of feet above the water. In front was a palm-filled plaza; behind, the water, the titular ferries cutting around the Bay.

I found a seat at the Hog Island Oyster Bar and, according to instructions, waited. It was a good place to wait. I ordered a dozen oysters and drank a draft pint and watched the oyster shuckers. There were two of them. One seemed to shuck at a steady three-oysters-per-minute rate. The other was faster. His technique seemed better. More fluid. He didn’t waste a motion. He seemed to get about four oysters a minute. He worked the oyster knife with small, easy gestures, flipping each full shell onto the bed of display ice and the empty shells into a trash can under the bar.