“You’re kidding, right?” Leon Tao protested as Reese dragged him down the street by his arm. “This is a legit job, I swear! I got it through a temp agency. It’s straight-up legal, really! I promise!”
“I know, Leon,” Reese grumbled. “Keep moving.”
Leon struggled to keep up. “Then why you dragging me around again? I swear, I didn’t do anything this time.”
“I’m sure you did something,” John countered as he shoved the man into his car. “But that’s not why I’m here.” He walked around and got in, and then he drove, fast.
As he’d expected, the navy sedan down the block followed him. Fast.
Reese grinned.
He let the other car follow him, without being too obvious about it, until he hit the freeway. He accelerated even more. Leon squealed in protest, braced his feet against the dash board. Which would, John knew, simply help shatter his legs if they got in an accident. But he didn’t bother to mention it.
The car continued to chase them. John got the car up to ninety miles per hour, swerving through the mid-afternoon traffic. He watched the mile markers as they flew by. The sedan closed on them. Three car lengths behind, then two. Well within shooting range, but the driver was alone and evidently he didn’t have enough confidence in his skills to try to fire a weapon while driving that fast.
“Oh my God you’re going to get us killed!” Leon wailed. "Slow down slow down slow down slow down!”
Reese jumped on his brakes. Leon lurched forward, then slammed back against his seat. One foot slipped and ended up against the windshield.
The would-be assassin flew right past Reese’s car ” and right into the speed trap.
The traffic cop lit up his lights and went after him. The killer kept going, accelerating, but John knew they’d stop him. And that he had several illegal weapons and five keys of heroin in the car. The killer, of course, only knew about the one weapon he’d brought with him. But John liked to plan ahead.
He resumed driving at the recommended speed. Leon struggled to get himself upright in the seat.
“Okay, Leon,” Reese said calmly, “where can I drop you?”
***
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” Christine sat back, set her coffee down. “But I’ll continue to deny any involvement.”
Will Ingram shook his head. “Not that. How much do you know about IFT? I mean, when my dad was running it.”
“I was a high school intern there for one summer. I knew where every coffee pot was and I could clear most copier jams. That’s about it.”
“But you could find out, right? I mean, if you had access, you could …” He stopped. “Here’s the thing. When my dad died, I got all of his records. Boxes of stuff. A lot of it’s person stuff, papers I did in school, random junk, whatever. But there’s a lot about the company, too. And some of it doesn’t make any sense. Like he downsized more than half his staff. For seven years. And then he sold something to the government for a dollar… a lot of it doesn’t make sense to me. And I don’t know much about computers ” okay, I don’t know anything about computers. But I can tell it doesn’t make any sense.”
She frowned at him, dubious. “Okay.”
“I would really like it if you could … if I could hire you to take a look at them.”
“You want me to look at your dad’s company documents and what? See if I can figure out what he was doing? We know what he was doing. It’s in the stockholder reports.”
“No, there was something else. Something more. Or less. I don’t know.”
She thought about it. “I could take a look.”
“There’s a catch, though. Maybe.” He picked up his fork and pushed his salad around, then put it down. “There was this woman who worked for the government. She knew about this whole dollar thing. She told me some stuff that was going on, about R & D failures and something about patents. Basically, she said IFT was going down the tubes. That he’d lost his touch.”
“And you don’t believe her?”
“I do, actually. Or I did. But the thing is, not very long after I talked to her she got killed. Shot. Here in New York.”
“By who?”
“That’s just it. They don’t know. The police. They never solved the case.” He picked up his fork and put it down again. “It probably has nothing to do with IFT, with her talking to me. But she was … weird. She moved to this little town in West Virginia that doesn’t have any cell towers or wi-fi. It took me forever to track her down. And she was scared, when I talked to her. Really scared. I don’t know if that was about my dad and the company or if it was something else.”
Christine sat back. “So this woman was telling you about IFT’s internals and then she got killed, so now you want me to look at IFT’s internals?”
“That’s why I wanted to tell you up front,” Will answered. “Maybe this is a bad idea. I’m sure this is a bad idea. You know what? Never mind. “
“Hush,” she answered. “You just dangled all of your father’s records in front of me. Give me a second.”
“It might be dangerous.” He shook his head. “That’s just it. If Alicia was killed because of what she knew about IFT, then it’s a big big deal and it’s really dangerous and you shouldn’t go anywhere near it, but I really want to know what it is. But if she wasn’t, if it was just a robbery or whatever, then what she told me was true and I don’t need you to look at it anyhow.”
“Intriguing.”
“I don’t want to put you in danger. Just forget it.”
“Mmm. I’ve got some friends in the police department. Let me poke around a little bit. I’ll see what they think about this woman “ Alicia?”
“Alicia Corwin.”
“Pretty name.” She nodded to herself. “Let me see what they think about that. Under the table. And then we’ll see where we go from there.”
“I don’t want to put you in danger,” Will repeated emphatically.
“Like I said, I know people. Let me see what they think, and then we’ll talk about this some more.” She picked up her coffee and took a long drink. “But all this downsizing and stuff, it was after 9/11?”
“Yeah. Started pretty much right after that.”
She nodded. “Then I can probably tell you right now what I’m going to find.”
“You can?” Will asked, dubious.
“Were you here, in the city, when the Towers came down?”
He shook his head. “I was at college.”
“But your dad was here.”
“Yes.”
She wrapped her hands around her mug, like they were cold. She was silent for a minute. Will waited; she was like one of his patients, trying to come up with just the right words for something that was hard to say. Finally she flexed her fingers. “I was still a heroin addict then. I didn’t really know any Suits. But I’ve gotten to know a lot since then, and a lot of them have the same story.”
You were a what? Will thought in surprise. He wanted to go back to the heroin part of her statement, but he didn’t want to interrupt her, either.
“Men a lot like your father,” she continued. “Rich, successful, confident that life was the way it should be. After that morning they went home and they looked around, at their full bank accounts and their empty houses, and a lot of them just …” She paused again and looked for words. “It was like a gigantic karmic wake-up call, you know? After the running and the screaming and the crying, everybody sorta looked at their lives and went, y’know, maybe I’m not where I want to be.”
“It was like that everywhere,” Will said gently.
“I suppose it was.” She shook her head. “A lot of people got married, or got divorced. I know at least three top-name execs who divorced their wives and married their assistants. Everybody stopped doing what was expected of them and started trying to do what made them happy. For a while. It didn’t last, of course. Maybe some of it did. Sorry, I’m rambling.”
Her hands were shaking, ever so slightly. “It’s okay,” Will assured her. “I know what you’re trying to say.”
“I suspect, and you can see if this fits what you saw, that your dad looked around at what he’d spent his whole life building and realized that it could all be gone in the space of an hour, and he started looking for … what he really wanted to be building instead.”
“You think he didn’t want to build IFT?”
“I don’t know. Maybe computer programs for car dashboards weren’t what he wanted. Maybe he really wanted to be writing video games. And maybe he didn’t want to be in computers at all, maybe he wanted to be, I don’t know, carving chess sets of out of tiki wood. Whatever. Whatever it was that he was doing eighty or ninety hours a week before the Towers fell, he might have woken up the next day and decided that wasn’t what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.”
Will thought about it for a long moment. “He started calling me every week,” he finally said.
“Just to talk?”
“Yes.”
Christine nodded, understanding.
“Before that, I always called him. Usually when I was in trouble. Or needed money. And we always fought. But after, he called just to talk. About anything.” He sighed. “We still fought. Almost always. I don’t know, maybe that’s just what kids do with their parents.”
“Maybe,” she answered vaguely.
Will continued to ponder. “So maybe he … tried something new and it didn’t work? And that’s why he needed the government to bail him out?”
“Maybe.”
“But the downsizing. That doesn’t make sense.”
“A lot of the west coast tech firms got very aggressive about recruiting here after that,” Christine offered. "They pushed the whole ‘we’ll pay to move your family out here where it’s safe’ angle really hard. They may have picked off some of his best people. They did with everybody else. So maybe he thought, well, change up the size while they’re leaving anyhow?”
“That’s possible, too.”
“It’s all speculation,” she admitted. “And all the answers might not be in those papers, anyhow. But you don’t build a company like IFT without being completely obsessed with it. And once the world knocks that obsession out of you, maybe you don’t keep building it at all. Maybe you find other things.”
He damn sure found other women, Will thought bitterly. Then he reined that emotion in sharply. No reason to think he didn’t find other things, too. She was probably right. But he wanted to know.
“If you want to do this, if you’re interested ” ask about the Corwin thing first. And if it’s not dangerous, if you’re sure, I’d pay you anything you want. Just to look, just to find out.”
A dangerous little smile played around the corners of her mouth. “Anything I want?”
“Uhhhhhh … yeah, pretty much. Except, you know, I still have that girlfriend, maybe.”
“I don’t think she’d object to what I have in mind. But let me talk to my peeps and get back to you.”
He smirked. “Your peeps.”
“Yeah. I got peeps. You wanna make somethin’ of it?”
“No. I’m good.” He picked up his own coffee again. “Were you really a heroin addict?”
She studied him for a minute. “Yes.”
“You went from IFT to street drugs in three years?”
“I went from IFT to street drugs in one afternoon.” Before he could ask another question, she raised just her fingertips. “Leave it, Will. We may talk about that someday, down the road. Maybe. But not today. We’re not there.”
He closed his mouth on the question, then picked up his fork. “The salads are really good here.”
Christine nodded. “You should try the steak tenderloin next time. It’s amazing.”
Ingram watched her fork as she moved ate. Her hand was still shaking, just a little, but it didn’t get any worse. By the time she finished her lunch it had steadied entirely.
***
Carter looked at the man calmly. “Okay,” she said, “one more time. Who hired you?”
The man looked away.
“We have Tony Woods in the next room,” she continued. “And I’m guessing he’s the guy. But without your statement, I can’t prove that.” She sat down across the table from him. “Now you, you’re already going up for the weapon, the high speed chase, and the drugs.”
“I’m told you, the drugs aren’t mine.”
“Whether they are or not, this thing isn’t going away. You’re on the hook for all of that, plus conspiracy and attempted murder. Only question is whether you go down alone, or whether you take your friend with you.”
He remained silent.
“Okay,” Carter said again. “I’ll go talk to Woods.”
She got as far as the door before he spoke up. “He’s not my friend.”
“Go on.”
“He hired me to kill the accountant. And get the laptop.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because he was stealing from his company.”
“So, how did this work? You were going to shoot him in a car and then what?”
The guy shrugged. “Figured he’d crash and I could grab the laptop.”
“Have you ever killed anybody before?”
The man looked away, licked his lips. “How hard can it be?”
***
“So?” Carter asked when her son got in the car. “How was it?”
The boy held his two hands up. On his ten dark fingers, there were six tan bandages.
She grimaced. “Paper cuts?”
“The paper’s not so bad,” Taylor said wearily. “The ribbons are a bitch.”
“Taylor.”
“Sorry, Mom.” He reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. “It was pretty cool, though. The elf crew is cool. Scotty’s cool. Zubec looks scary, but he’s really cool, too.”
“So everybody’s cool?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded. “I think I know why you’re failing English.”
He sighed and closed his eyes. “Can I go see Tia when we get home?”
“Sure,” Carter answered “Soon as you put some time in on your extra credit paper.”
Taylor sat up and dug into his backpack. He brought out a battered spiral notebook and flipped through it, then pinched several pages between his fingers. “Worked on it during lunch,” he said. “I asked the crew about it. Got this many notes.”
She glanced over at the papers. She couldn’t read them, since it was dark and she was driving, but at least the top page was covered with writing. She looked at his bandaged fingers again, too. “All right,” she finally agreed. “But some time when I’m not driving, I want to see the work.”
“Okay,” he agreed at once.
“Okay.” Carter smiled tightly and turned the car toward home.
***
Reese got out of his car and looked around carefully. No threat caught his eye. He didn’t really expect one, but Finch’s call had been so odd that it set his nerves on full alert. Christine needed to see him right away, the billionaire had said. But he wouldn’t say why, only where. Then he hung up.
So many things wrong with that call. For starters, if Christine needed to see John, she would have called him directly. And second, she was parked at the end of the lot and was standing outside her car, with her back to him. She glanced over her shoulder, but didn’t turn. “Christine?” he said, striding toward her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She turned around. Unexpectedly, she had a toddler in her arms. A rosy-cheeked little girl in a scarlet coat and a pink hat and gloves and …
“Leila!”
The child hid her face against Christine’s coat. John went closer anyhow, put his hand on her back, kissed the top of her head through her hat. She’d gotten much bigger since he’d last seen her. Long legs, long arms; already she was turning into a girl instead of a baby.
She turned her head and peeked at him, smiled, then hid her face again.
“I don’t understand,” John said to Christine. “How did you do this?”
“Not me, sweetie. I just showed up with a note and picked her up. She’s yours for the afternoon.” She held out a sheet of paper awkwardly around the toddler. “This is your suggested itinerary.”
Reese took the paper and glanced over it. It was Harold’s crisp handwriting. “Zoo first,” he read. “Especially penguins.” There was, not surprisingly, a zoo pass clipped to the paper.
Leila popped her head up. “Pengins?” she asked hopefully.
John smiled at her. “You want to go see penguins with me?”
She nodded enthusiastically and held her arms out to him.
John took her. She was heavier, of course, but much less floppy than when she was a baby. She put her arm around his neck and held herself up. He buried his face against her, took a deep breath. She smelled wonderful. Like baby shampoo and vanilla and love.
Christine popped her trunk open and unloaded a stroller. John didn’t really think he’d need it; he didn’t want to let the child out of his arms. But he watched while she showed him where the latch was to fold and unfold it. She brought out a diaper bag and tucked in into the baggage compartment of the stroller. “Unlock your car,” she directed. He clicked the keys and watched while she transferred the car seat over. Lastly, she handed him a little box of animal crackers. Leila reached for them and he let her have one.
“Pengins,” the girl insisted.
“Yes, love. Just a minute.” He turned to Christine. “Are you in on everybody’s surprises?”
“Pretty much.”
“Thank you.”
She smiled. “Have fun.” She leaned and kissed Leila on the cheek. Then she kissed John on the cheek, too.
“Pengins!” Leila insisted.
John looked at the toddler. “You’re kind of a bossy little thing, aren’t you?”
“Pengins!”
“Penguins.” He watched Christine get into her car. Then he pushed the stroller with one hand and headed for the zoo entrance.
***
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